[Anubis]

Well.. I figured with all the luck I've had in the past with my pc's crashing, I decided to get a external hard drive. Also because the movies and music I have on my current HD take up about 240Gb. I ended up going with a Western Digital 1Tb external drive. I read a bunch of customer reviews and this seemed to be a pretty decent drive. Anyone else have any experience with this particular model? It's the Essential Edition 2.0

 

[ImNotAsCoolAsU]

Dunno but I have a my book world II 2tb that should be here in a day or two. Needed something for backups and that I could access from my laptop anywhere in the house. Looked nice, but I did find a few reviews that said the fans were loud. I'll just put it in the closet if so, don't really need to see it since it's networked.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=340&language=en

 

[Paytheon]

I use WD externals and have had pretty good luck with them. I mostly use them for virtualized machines to setup development environments on. They are great. You won't regret having one.

 

[Anubis]

Hooked this baby up just now. VERY SIMPLE. It's literally "plug and play." In the process of backing everything up right now. :beer So easy, even a caveman can do it.

 

[z06boy]

Hooked this baby up just now. VERY SIMPLE. It's literally "plug and play." In the process of backing everything up right now. :beer So easy, even a caveman can do it.

Price ? We need to get one as well.

 

[Klo1320]

Price ? We need to get one as well.

don't know where Anubis got his, but here is a link i found.

http://bensbargains.net/deal/50196/?referrer=rss

 

[Anubis]

Price ? We need to get one as well.

Got mine from Best Buy for $260.

 

[Bogie]

So you're hiding your porn stash!! :fact :lol :lol

 

[Anubis]

So your hiding your porn stash!! :fact :lol :lol

:fact :yesnod And it's "you're"

 

[Bogie]

:fact :yesnod And it's "you're"

I knew it!!! :fact :lol

oh and :finger :chair:

 

[KenshinR1]

Well.. I figured with all the luck I've had in the past with my pc's crashing, I decided to get a external hard drive. Also because the porn I have on my current HD take up about 240Gb. I ended up going with a Western Digital 1Tb external drive. I read a bunch of customer reviews and this seemed to be a pretty decent drive. Anyone else have any experience with this particular model? It's the Essential Edition 2.0

fixed

 

[R1Budha]

several things to note about external hard drives.
1. in a Windows environment, these drives are not seen like regular Hard Drives because they are not attached to a normal SATA or PATA channel. This means that they will not "spool down" when not in use like regular internal drives will based upon the power settings for the computer.
2. These enclosures DO NOT vent as well as a good computer case and thus tend to run the temperatures of the drives when operating much higher. Even the units with fans will do so. It's best to get an aluminum enclosure if you can, as the metal will help dissapate heat where the plastic will insulate it.
3. Most of the Purchased external drives only come eith a one year warranty whereas most internal drives have either a three year or five year warranty. See #1 and #2 for why.


If you want to extend the life of an external drive, simply unplug it when not in use or turn it off if it has a switch.

This will cause it not to spin, not to generate heat, and will GREATLY prolong the life of the drive.

Oh, and for anyone using the MyBook world edition, apparently, WD has blocked thre ability to stream most media files through it's "web access" portion recently.

Lucky you.....

 

[06r1NR]

cor!!!!!!

i have that exact same drive. love it and hate it.

first off you should note, dont ever try to use it as a network share. its pretty much impossible without removing it from the case, defeating the whole external hard drive thing.

the second thing i dont like about it is the mini-USB connection. id rather do 1394 or USB2.0 but whatever

thats about it tho. i love the size of the drive, the transfer rate is decent, its quiet, the light lets you know its busy, lotsa good stuff tho, good choice

 

[06r1NR]

several things to note about external hard drives.
1. in a Windows environment, these drives are not seen like regular Hard Drives because they are not attached to a normal SATA or PATA channel. This means that they will not "spool down" when not in use like regular internal drives will based upon the power settings for the computer.
2. These enclosures DO NOT vent as well as a good computer case and thus tend to run the temperatures of the drives when operating much higher. Even the units with fans will do so. It's best to get an aluminum enclosure if you can, as the metal will help dissapate heat where the plastic will insulate it.
3. Most of the Purchased external drives only come eith a one year warranty whereas most internal drives have either a three year or five year warranty. See #1 and #2 for why.


If you want to extend the life of an external drive, simply unplug it when not in use or turn it off if it has a switch.

This will cause it not to spin, not to generate heat, and will GREATLY prolong the life of the drive.

Oh, and for anyone using the MyBook world edition, apparently, WD has blocked thre ability to stream most media files through it's "web access" portion recently.

Lucky you.....

actually, this particular drive, has extremely good ventilation, it doesnt power off per say when it goes into sleep mode but more of a stand by/no spin mode.

it does not act like a hardwired drive, shares disappear when its disconnected, and because its a WD drive, its virtually non-network accessable. and i totally agree with the whole turn it off when not using it, unfortunatley i use it on my FTP server (hint) so its constantly on. ive had it for a little over 6 months with no problems so far other than network use.

i would like to see a power switch on them, that would be nice instead of a dangling cord, but i take what i can get. also, if anyone has any large volume copying when they get a new 750+ GB drive, maxtor has a great copy and forget it util called MaxBlast. you basically tell the software, copy this, put it here now run. and it does exactly that. sometimes it has write failures on the recieving drive, but the most ive done is maybe 10 failures in one session. thats not too bad considering i was copying about 98,366 files of various sizes.

overall, the Essentials version, for what its worth, is pretty good for its size, capacity, price and performance. 'problems' arise when you try to do more with it than what its intended to do. i mean, hello??? thats what FTP, Remote access and Dual Layer DVD's are for!!

i have about 26,000+ mp3s on my drive that are backed up to a 500GB drive internally. i have yet to make the endeavor to back them up to DL-DVD's yet because honestly, i havent found a decent enough program that will backup more than 9.5GB spanned over 15 disks. (Math= approx. 150 GB of music.)

i read lots of reviews, specs and have used WD drives for years. unfortunately they are now partnered with M$ and theres been a lot of 'issues' but i think i honestly got my 270.00's worth out of this drive so far.

 

[06r1NR]

one last thing, i know ive been on a rant about these things.

WD hasthat whole media restriction, i believe Nuuuub and i got ours around the same time frame so they should be immune to this conspiracy theory restriction. however i have attempted to network share this drive many many times, doing lots and lots of googling and independent research. Im talking down to the registry level.... and nothing works.

i never had a problem networking a NON-WD External drive. Ive also called WD support and they say they dont support networking of external drives yet you CAN set it up as a network share, just not see the contents of have the permissions to access this drive. (Even as administrator)

i would be very curious to see if someone could accomplish this feat and what the exact process you take to do it would be.

Dunno but I have a my book world II 2tb that should be here in a day or two. Needed something for backups and that I could access from my laptop anywhere in the house. Looked nice, but I did find a few reviews that said the fans were loud. I'll just put it in the closet if so, don't really need to see it since it's networked.

Therein will prolly reside the networking problem.
im actually of the mind that most, if not all WD ext drives have it hardcoded in the drive BIOS that they are NOT a network sharable device. simple reason for this is that when i had my WD 320 GB multi card reader drive, i could not network that thing to save my life. well then the drive 'died' and the warranty was out on it. so in a last ditch effort, i ripped it out of the case, slapped it in the computer, fired that sucker up and low and behold.... i now had my 320GB drive back, all data still in tact.

Was it that the bios failed due to hardware failure? ill never know.
Are the 1+ TB drives also protected by this hardware BIOS restriction as well?

Those questions posed, doesnt this completely defeat the entire purpose of an EXTERNAL PORTABLE HARD DRIVE ?

Wheres the work around for that?

 

[06r1NR]

Finally Networked!!!!

ok Cor, finally got this SOB network use able.
heres what you do....

First step:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913628
do that,
my restrictanonymous = 0
my restrictanonymoussam = 0

Second Step:
THIS LINK

Changed my IRPStackSize to 50 just because.
Lmanannounce = 0

i think i did a few other things too, here and there along the way but this finally worked. any questions dude, you know how to find me...

 

[Anubis]

Glad I'm just using it to back up my files and store my DVD's. :lol

 

[NSDQ]

I have the 2TB version that comes with a built-in gigabit network interface. You can set up the drives in a RAID array or you can set aside the whole thing for storage (which I did, I want mawr). The web interface for setup is quite simple and Windows file sharing is a snap. The bad news, Western Digital installed a WOEFULLY UNDERPOWERED CPU in the unit, which means that the file transfer rate is terrible, even though you have a Gigabit Ethernet card in the unit. Based on my tests (and other posting on the Web), it looks like the best sustained transfer rate you are going to get is around 5 Mbps. I'm only using it for backing up my backups.

 

[rorlow]

I've been contemplating an external drive for my iMac was originally looked at the apple Time Capsule. The reviews were terrible as far as transfer rates via wireless, so I started looking at Firewire 800 drives. After reading a ton of reviews the one that got the best reviews was G-Tech, so I'm considering the 1TB one below. The other thing thats nice is its an all aluminum case with a heat sink, and has a 3yr. warranty :secret:

Brief description-
The industry's first quad-interface external disk storage solutions
FireWire 400, FireWire 800, USB 2.0 and eSATA ports all in a single unit
"Fan-less" design with unique silent cooling technology
Time Machine Ready!
Storage capacities up to 1000 GB
Utilizes the next-gen 924 chipset from Oxford Semiconductor
High-performance 7200 RPM SATA II drives w/up to 32MB cache
Standard 3-Year factory warranty
Driver-free operation with Mac OS X and Windows 2000/XP

 

[thisoneguy]

Drobo FTW!

http://www.drobo.com/products.html