Product Description

Western Digital Plug Mybook 500Gb HD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13970 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Western Digital
• Model: WDG1U5000E
• Released on: 2006-04-11
• Dimensions: 2.25" h x 5.55" w x 6.71" l, 2.87 pounds
• Hard Disk: 500GB

Features

• Western Digital Plug Mybook 500Gb HD

Manufacturer's Description
Small, simple, elegant, and very easy to use. Just plug it in, and you've got plenty of room to back up and save your valuable data, music, photos, and movies.The elegant case, iconic of a book, takes up less space on your desk, stacks horizontally, and allows two or more drives to nestle neatly together like volumes on a shelf. SmartPower automatic power on/off and LED activity lights make this drive especially easy to use. Inside the case is an exceptionally fast (7200 RPM spin speed), ultra quiet, cool-running hard drive from WD, of course!

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

Quiet, discrete external HDD
Bought this external drive to store music files and photos. It runs very quietly so is ideal for siting in a lounge or TV room, where ambient noise would be a nuisance.

Comes with minimal documentation, although there is a web link where additional manuals and tech support can be found. Pleased to say, I needed neither. Plugged drive into the mains adapator and a USB port, Windows Explorer found it automatically and I was able to use it immediately.

Access speed seems fine. It took about 90 mins to write 150GB of music files, read speeds present no problem. My drive feeds Slimserver and a Squeezebox without any difficulty.

My only minor complaint and not enough to drop 1 star: The manual makes a reference to the FAT/ NFTS formatting issue, but the warning could be more explicit (if you start using FAT default you need to reformat the entire drive to switch to NFTS). That said, the drive is empty when you get it, so Windows Quick format option does the trick and formats in NFTS in about 10 seconds. Just make sure you know what format you need before using the drive.

Just returned second defective drive...
My first Western Digital My Book 500GB drive was dead on arrival. The second arrived this morning. (I'm very impressed with Amazon.co.uk)

The replacement powered up and was recognised, unlike the first. However, I was immediately aware that it was very noisy. I placed it on some foam to try to lessen the sound. That's when I began to hear the occasional sound of what I take to be the heads touching the discs.

I had spoken with the Western Digital telephone help desk when I had the first problem. I was told that it was best to replace through Amazon because "all replacement discs sent out by Western Digital are reconditioned units".

When I suspected likely future problems with the second drive I didn't hesitate for a moment and the drive was immediately packed up and is about to go back.

Nice backup external drive
Nicely boxed, containing usb cable (about 1.5m), power block and power cables - both British and American. Nicely solid metal "pages", despite the black plastic "book cover". Quite stylish green circle on the side, although not ultra bright.

It doesn't power on until you plug in the usb cable as well as the obvious power cable, but once set up it is automatically picked up by Windows 2000 (or above) and starts up a window asking if you want to install Google software (toolbar for IE, Google desktop search and Picasa), Acrobat and the pdf manual or Western Digital disk tools. WD Tools seem slightly pointless apart from a disk eraser tool but even then I would download a free open source military grade version from the internet to use rather than theirs. The WD tests just seem to say Pass or Fail - would have liked to see more information about these. Apparently the disk contained is a SATA WDC WD5000KS disk.

Copied 1.9gigabytes (as measured by Windows folder properties rather than the 2gb WD would call it) as represented by 2500 files, to the disk in about 7minutes 35seconds - so a rough throughput of 250megabytes a minute. Very quiet buzz&clicking when writing data - not bad considering you can actually look in through the cooling vents and see the physical disk inside.
Gets slightly warm after extended effort so placing it on it's end like an actual book seems best due to the cooling slots then available on top.

It powers itself down from it's already quiet state to utterly silent after about 15minutes and then takes about 7 seconds to power back up if you access it. Very quiet unless on a resonating surface (i.e. a wooden desk) when it makes a slight hum from the vibration - however the supplied sticky rubber feetpads only have mounting points if it's laid down on it's side so you'll need to improvise.

All in all, a very good drive for backups at a very good price point.