Discount Western Digital My Book Home Edition 1 TB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive WDH1CS10000N

After reading all the negative reviews, I was a little reluctant about purchasing the drive. However, because of the easy return policy and great price, I decided to take a chance.

I have only been using the drive for about a week, but so far, I have had none of the problems that others have mentioned. The unit runs quietly. It came with both a USB and firewire cable, both of which worked.

I'm working off a PC running Vista Home 64bit. The first thing I did was re-format to NTFS (it comes as FAT32) I also broke it down into 3 partitions - I only did that for my particular use, you don't need to partition the drive. I read one review that said it took hours to reformat... the formatting and partitioning took me less than five minutes. I then ran a couple of tests with the various interfaces. Transferring a file that was slightly over 1GB took 43sec on the USB, 40sec with firewire and using the eSATA (you have to buy that cable separately) was only 19sec. As they say, your times may vary, but this at least gave me a sense of which interface I wanted to use. If you are going to be doing a lot of transferring or backing up files, it's probably worth investing in the eSATA cable.

For the short time I have had it, I have used it both for backing up a fairly large set of files (70GB) as well as an auxiliary drive with files I may need to access daily. I have found it works fine for both. Yes, depending on which interface you are using, the drive may shut off if your computer goes to sleep, but starting it back up was as simple as pushing the power button on the back. And in the reverse, if it didn't shut off when you closed down the computer, you simply push the power button and hold it for a few seconds and it powers off. I also read how several people complained that it couldn't be plugged into a surge-protected power strip. I'm not sure what problem they had, but I have it plugged into a surge-protected UPS without any problem.

I can't attest to how well it will perform over a period of time, but so far, it has worked very well for me.Get more detail about Western Digital My Book Home Edition 1 TB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/eSATA Desktop External Hard Drive WDH1CS10000N.