perfectly happy so far

I have bought a few months ago a My Book 320 and I thought of getting something bigger this time.
Hooked it up to my iMac intel by firewire, and like his little brother did (though through USB that one) it worked immediately.
Chose it to be my Time Machine back-up drive and...voila' .... and by the way I love the ice-cold light in front, it's cool.
I'm surprised that this little fella has received so many bad reviews.
I was almost going to buy something else... but then I stuck to my previous positive experience with this product line and went for it. Although I bought it at Costco, just to make sure I could return it easily. ;-)
So far so good and gret value for money.
Maybe I am just lucky.
It is clear that if so many rotten apples have been shipped out... WD should get a new quality control manager in place rather quickly!

GOBBAGE!!

I was supposed to buy the other Western Digital 1 TB but accidentally bought this one and it happened just like the others said. Plug it in light comes on but nothing else happens and tried it on multiple computers. I tried it about 100 times determined to get my money's worth and through out all those tries it showed up on the computer exactly 1 time. Convinced that it had started working I dragged a couple files into it (like a minuscule 200 mb... I'm no fool!) and left it alone for like a day and lo and behold the next day the power light was off for some odd reason (computer was still on) and it went back to being dead. I'm upset...This is the type of stuff I'm talking about....don't make no sense. Oh well it's going back to the store where I bought it...cuz that one that I have is Gobbage. Maybe I'll try a 500 gig even though I don't think that's enough.

Power management features make drive unstable on eSATA

This drive automatically spins down when not being used, and there is no way to disable this feature. Unfortunately on my computer under Windows, this means that the drive disappears in "My Computer" and the Disk Management tools if I don't use the drive for extended periods of time. The only way to get the computer to recognize the drive again is to power cycle the drive manually by pushing the power button on the back, it will not automatically "wake up" when I try to use the drive.

Western Digital's only recommendation was that I switch to a slower USB/Firewire connection, as their "button manager" software can keep the drive alive. This feature is not supported on the faster eSATA connection, however. (If that's the case, why did I pay more for an eSATA-capable drive?) At least the company did do an RMA exchange of my drive, just in case it was a problem with the drive or other components, but the replacement had the same issue too. This seems to be a "feature".

Their tech support  more

My Book

the best exteral Hard Drive ever very easy to hook up just pugin the power then data conection and let your computer do the rest . please follow instructions for your computer (pc or mac)

i wouldn't trust this drive

I got this drive with high hopes... however, it goes to sleep after being inactive for ten minutes or so and that's it. not only can't you wake it, you have to power it off to unfreeze your computer. even so i was trying to work with it until it powered down while i was working on a file. i shut it off, powered it back on and saved the file. the next day i went to work on my file and it was 'unable to open file' even though i saw the thumbnail. i had to drag the files off that drive onto my computers drive (mac book pro) to open them again. certainly this didn't give me a good feeling about trusting it with my work. who knows what kind of corruption it will do to my files!

This drive is nothing but problems ...

I am an Apple user and bought this drive to put all my family movies on. It worked out of the box for about two days ... then, I got the dreaded "This computer does not recognize the inserted disk." I get the message over and over. I'm going to take it back to Costco today. I had high hopes -- but it's been a huge disappointment. I bought a WD "500" before this, and half the time it is dead as a doornail, and then occasionally it'll snap back to life. Let's just say I don't trust it. I wouldn't buy one again -- both drives are going back to Costco.

Avoid the WD My Book Home Edition 1 tb model

I have have 500 gb model running on OSX 10.5 with no issues. The 1 tb model is problematic with quality. I have already returned 5 drives for various issues (Does not spin up 2x, Spins up but not recognized 2x, and DOA). Did simon says with tech support, swap cables, connected to diff CPU, diff OS (Vista, XP, OSX), diff interfaces, swapped out with existing WD My book drive(500 gb model). Uninstalled and Reinstalled drivers. If you still want to try it make sure you can return it. Because you probably will.

Do you feel like gambling with your data?

I bought three of these drives to use for backups for Macs. Opened one, hooked it up to an Intel iMac (OS X 10.4.11) via firewire and nothing appeared on desktop. Disk utility didn't see it; System profiler couldn't even identify the firewire device (though it saw something) on the firewire bus. I powered it off, tried the usb port and it doesn't even register in System profiler, much less come up. Opened the second drive, same thing: nada. Tried using my own cables, tried opening it on a PPC mini, a G4 laptop (all running 10.4) and a Dell Win XP laptop and no joy. I have had 1.5 TB external RAID6 firewire/usb enclosures attached to these machines with no problems so the disk size isn't the issue. I've built many extern drives via enclosure kits and had no problems (some chipsets wouldn't boot a Mac but they always appeared), so this is a big warning flag.

By chance one (and only one) time, when I tried swapping their cheap power bricks between the two, and magically one (but only  more

The method to make this drive working

I got the same problem just like the rest of the customer had. ""not recognize by the pc". Be honest, this drive has a lot of the complains from customer. But unfortunately, i have a bad habit-i don't give up to try because i pay too much for this and i know that WD is not that low to sell a defected drive. So, i use another method- by searching the system and device driver to see this Harddrive does exist in the list. As i notice, it does exist, just the "my computer" menu doesn't display. So i reformat the drive from the device manager. Good thing is, i use the USB and make it done, Although i never try in another type of wire. Notice this, This drive does work, but all customers need to use on their own knowledge and experience in computer to bypass the problem. One last thing, make sure this drive is the only USB device in your pc by using it, then do the reformat to make the pc recognize it.