I go to Amazon whenever I want to purchase any equipment, even if I purchase it somewhere else. I do this because the reviews are amongst the best you can find on the internet. However, anyone who has read reviews like this for more than a few months begins to realize that reviews are written by 1) those who have received a defective product, or has a feature they don't like, or 2) those who truly love a product. You never hear from the other 99% of the customers purchasing the product who don't fit in these categories. In particular, purchasers who get a defective product are typically angry and vindictive, as though it was a personal vendetta. I find this unbelievable, as buying any product has a risk of failure attached to it. These angry reviewers don't accurately reflect the failure rate of a device, or the commonest opinion of a product characteristic.
I purchased the 2 Tb drive and it works fine. I did NOT install the Smartware, as I wanted to selectively back up specific directories. Some customers will want the auto back up, and that works for them. The case is no cheaper or poorly-designed than any other mass-produced electronic product these days. I don't find the switch to be a problem--it's designed to prevent accidental shut off of the device. If you want a large back up drive for a decent price, this works fine. If you want ultimate flexibility, get an external drive not designed for simple back up. Complainers should get a life..... Western Digital My Book Essential 2 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive
Hello people- you are either being lazy or incompetent. Western Digital's website gives you instructions on how to disable the SmartWare technology (which is, in a word, horrible). After doing so, the drive operates just like any other external hard drive. WD should include this information upfront and let the user choose how to configure their HD- clearly an error by their product team. However, a quick Google search got me where I needed to go. Drive works great- 2TB for $200.
Link to instructions on how to disable SmartWare:
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I have seriously mixed feelings about this product. It's a decent hard drive, but the bundled software sucks (see below).
Pros:
- HDtune was showing an average read transfer rate around 32 MB/s, which isn't bad for USB 2.0.
- The outer casing is very nice looking, but somewhat flimsy. Part of the back panel wasn't snapped in completely on mine, so I had to pop it back into place.
- Drive can be used for storage without installing the included software
Cons:
- WD embedded their software on a virtual CD drive partition on the drive.
- The virtual CD disk partition can actually be disabled in the device manager in Windows. After you do that, the partition will disappear from "My Computer". I'm not sure about the workaround for macs
- If you do try the software, be aware that it runs in the background all the time. Even with the drive unplugged it will randomly consume 60-80% of your CPU. My i7 8-threaded CPU was getting all threads loaded up to this amount. It's not even doing any back up operations. I got so sick of killing the process that I just uninstalled the software. I'm running windows 7 and it has a fairly easy to use backup system. I've moved over to that and it works fine with this drive. You can also just drag and drop files on the drive as well.
PLEASE READ THE LATEST REVIEWS OF THIS PRODUCT FIRST! WD HAS APPARENTLY CORRECTED MANY OF THE INITIAL COMPLAINTS ABOUT SMARTWARE SOFTWARE. Here is my story (and keep in mind that every review is just one person's experience, good or bad, and that the vast majority of purchasers do not submit a review, in most cases most likely because they had little/no problem with the product).
Yesterday I received my WD My Book Essential 2TB External Drive with Smartware. I also downloaded the online complete user's guide from the WD website (something which it appears many of those who had a negative experience did not do). Installing was very easy, but just to be sure, on a couple of points, I called the WD support line, immediately got through and every time the techie was helpful and resolved the issue. The software installed, no problem, and the drive appears to be running, no problem. All my files (about 60 GB) were backed up in less than two hours, as the WD techie predicted. Since then, the drive has been working fine, no excessive on and off, just humming in the background with minimal activity. And this is on default settings. I get no intrusive "pop-up" of any icons. Yes, the smartware shows as a CD drive on the My Computer panel, but so what. All in all, the drive is doing just what it claims to do.
FYI, my computer is a relatively new Gateway with a Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS, Intel Core 2 Quad processor, with 6 GB of RAM memory and a 1 TB hard drive. It gives no indication of being slowed by the Smartware software. My guess is that my experience is probably pretty typical of many if not most buyers of this product. So far so good, and I will report back if I have an unexpected problem. And BTW, my purpose in buying the drive was to obtain an efficient, easy-to-use means of keeping my computer backed up on a real-time basis, without having a scheduled backup period and a lengthy backing up, each time, of the entire contents of my computer. Once it conducts its initial backup, the My Book only backs up what has been newly added to my computer. Exactly what I want. - External Hard Drive - My Book - 2 Tb - Western Digital'
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