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At least it hasn't completely pooped out (yet). And a not-so-happy owner of one of these. Really, I wonder whether I got one of the USB 2.0 ones, or if this is an older model 1.0. The ones I really like are the internal drives, have 3 PATA and two SATA WD's and those have been real champs, with no failures at all over all this time. Not even in the same league, not even in the same city as this external drive. Here's how slow that is: I set up this 750G My Book to SHRED the 400G igs of empty space on the drive (overwriting empty space with just one pass of zero's) and went to bed. To do so risks your data.
7 hours later, it wasn't even 1/4 done.The other thing that makes me nervous about this drive is all of the "It died" comments and even the positive reviewer who advised to backup the backup. Not just slow to write through the USB bus, but slow to format, slow to defrag, slow to SHRED critical data with DOD Delete. What kind of reliability are we talking about, when someone who likes the drive doesn't even trust it. For the moderately "tekkie" inclined, that would be the way to go.
I am a very happy owner of several WD hard drives. By lifting mine while defragging, it caused Windows Defragmenter to crash, which is the first time in 16 years' of computer ownership I've seen that happen.Did I mention S-L-O-W. My two SATA WD's are 300 GB drives and must be 8 times faster to defrag or reformat. This is the pee-wee league here. :-)OK so here's my Big Tip Of The Day: Do not move this drive around while it is writing. Wondering now whether this was a good choice.If I had to do it over again, I would have obtained a firewire external box and placed an OEM Western Digital drive in it. Some have been in continuous service since 2003.But this outboard "My Book" seems to be a completely different creature.For one thing it's agonizingly slow. It does not have a power switch, which indicates the newer model, and has the two vertical blue strip LED's, so I guess it is one of the newer ones.
What's that tell you. Do not move it at all, don't tilt it, bump, lift or anything. Bought it about a year ago and have kept it in my fire safe to have a worst-case safe copy if the rest of the place goes up. Or just keep shopping.
It's a really nice hard drive. The physical appearance can make it seem like a book on your library. It's really great that it's intelligent enough so that it powers on when it's connected to the laptop and when you disconnect it it powers off, so you don't need to be connecting the power of the hard drive. I believe it's a reasonable price for the amount of space.
Blew away the existing file system and Windows junk included on the disk. It just works fine. Using it as a backup drive for my Debian Linux machine (kernel 2.6.32-trunk-amd64). Created a new GPT with parted. Encrypted and formatted it with ext4.
These are excellent - reliable, fast, easy to connect. You can even upgrade the drive in them, once you figure out how to open the case. It is a little bulky, but probably has better cooling that way. Recommend it.
This is great backup drive. We've had ours for over a year with no problems.
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