- Ok price per GB
- Use an external (or rather non-bus) power supply so it won’t suck the juice from a laptop or (more importantly) won’t require a USB port to itself
- Understands when the host machine is on and off and acts accordingly
- Quiet to run
- Doesn’t look ugly
I plumped for the Premium rather than the Express because of it’s "Capacity Gauge" – a little coloured ring that shows how full (or not) it is. They also do a Pro but that seems more about connectivity.
So how is it? Well first impressions are pretty good. I plugged into both USB and Firewire without any problem, which is great ’cause I’ve got lots of USB devices and no Firewire so it won’t take another devices place on the hub. It’s not the fastest drive in the world and the backup software was frankly odd to use. It seems to run in one of two modes; a) All documents/pictures/music etc – it will scan all the folders on the drives you tell it b) You tell me what folder to backup. I’d really want a combination of the two but there you go. Plus it took about 5-6 hours to backup the documents I requested but only seemed to take about 30 mins to manually copy the files over. So I’ve gone back to simply copying the files I want to the drive. OK I won’t be able to do incremental backups but I’ve always been wary of those.
Is it noisy? No actually it’s pretty quiet and will shut itself down when not in use so I’m very pleased with that. It does vibrate when sitting on my desk but putting a magazine under it was enough to stop that, so that says more about the quality of my desk than the drive! It also stays pretty cool so environmentally very good.
So it’s all rosy? Not quite, the reason for me upgrading to a premium doesn’t seem to work – the capacity ring. I’ve gone through the KB and uninstalled/reinstalled but nothing has convinced it to start working. I’ve posted to WD so I’ll see what their support is like.
[Edit]
Over a week has passed and I’ve not received a single response from WD. So I’ve sent yet another "Question" to them. So far I’m not very impressed with their support team. I’ve also connected the MyBook to another PC and still no joy viewing the capacity.
[Edit]
Guess what, still no response. To be honest I’m pretty disgusted with them. Well I’ll give them another few days but so far I can’t honestly recommend buying any WD disk if this is the level of service you can expect.
IT Bytes 