Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 Great back-up tool - works with Time machine. December 29, 2008
J. Spence
I purchased this hard drive mostly for back-up purposes and chose this particular one for it's size and firewire connection. I did not use the included software since this drive is connected to a Mac using "Time Machine" software but I can say that "Time machine" is quite compatible with this drive. I have had no problems with this drive within the first week. Do yourself a favor and buy sheilded cables, don't depend on the cheap cables the drive comes with.
Excellent drive, but take care with the setup December 21, 2008
P. Brenner (Washington, DC)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The WD My Book Home Edition (320gb) is an excellent drive and the hardware has given me no problems. It runs very quietly, it is well vented and so does not heat up, it turns on and off (smartly) either with its own power button or when the computer is powered on and off, and it offers firewire, eSATA, and USB connections. The caveat here is the software that comes with the drive. The drive I purchased was new but was built six months ago, and the free backup software was an older version that is very buggy with Vista. (Note, there is a Product Key for the software on the white installation sheet that you'll need to enter at setup.) The software (MEMEO) website was not at all helpful in handling the problems I encountered. But MEMEO customer service was superb. A technician responded quickly to an e-mail, precisely diagnosed the problem, and provided clear directions for removing the older version and installing (at no cost) the most current version. The current version works very well, and automatically backs up files seamlessly. One other note on setup. The drive comes formatted with FAT32. That's fine if your files are no bigger than 4gb. But if you want to save a larger file (e.g., a video file), you'll need to reformat the drive with NTFS, and you might as well do that at the beginning because you'll lose all the data on the drive when you reformat. At the same time you also may want to partition the drive, to isolate different kinds of files from one another. The backup software allows you to create different "plans" for this purpose. Happily, the Western Digital telephone support (free for 30 days) was very helpful in walking me through the process.
Lots of space, portable September 20, 2008
Carolyn Osborne (Ohio, USA)
Back when I thought a 20 meg hard drive was huge, I never imagined that I would fill my 120 gig hard drive on my laptop with video files (often more than 20 meg per file!) and face a space crisis. Well, I did, so I bought this 320 gig portable external hard drive. It transports well and it has relieved the space issue on my laptop. It does require electricity, so it's not like you can take it up on a mountaintop with your laptop, but you can get rid of stuff you don't use all the time and store it. You can also back up your computer on this (although using their software may be problematic).
Having read the reviews of this, I elected not to use the included software and I like this hard drive very much.
 Nice Drive September 15, 2008
J. Hager (South Texas, USA)
Bought three of these drives, working well so far. Like the multiple connection options, make it easy to use on PC or Mac.
Standard hard drive, slightly annoying OS X software June 25, 2008
Aileen Chen (SF Bay Area)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I've put the drive on a bookshelf next to my desk and it fits in nicely. It has a little LED on the front that goes off and stuff, but I don't see it doing anything meaningful.
The OS X software is OK. It's a little slow, and I could not find the serial number for the trial software in the box. -1 star for that.
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