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Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive | 
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| Brand: Western Digital
Category: CE
Buy New: £53.00
New (28) Used (1) from £53.00
Rating:  75 reviews
Sales Rank: 12
Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Fragile: No
Batteries Included: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.5
Dimensions (in): 5.4 x 2.1 x 6.5
MPN: WDH1U5000E
Model: WDH1U5000E
UPC: 718037120928
EAN: 0718037120928
ASIN: B000WP0NM8
Release Date: November 25, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 2-3 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 70 more reviews...
 Fantastic external HDD August 28, 2008
J. Baker (Devon, UK)
I was quite astounded by this product, so much storage and so cheap. It even looks good! It worked first time on both my Macbook and my PC.
Don't even try the included software; this disk is plug and play with any modern computer.
Highly recommended. You can be confident buying this.
At the risk of being a boring old fart, I will tell you that 30 years ago I bought a hard disk - 8MB, yes MB not GB. It was the size of a washing machine and cost 10,000 UK pounds. Things have moved on a bit...
 Major, major risk August 19, 2008
catboylikesay (London, UK)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
WD keep updating the outside of the box, but don't seem to have done anything about the fundamental problem which a lot of reviewers (including myself) have experienced: namely, after about 18 months you will get an I/O error, followed by clicks, followed by the disk being totally inaccessible. WD will provide a replacement, but all your data will be lost. This was a great storage solution until the day it died. As a permanent solution, experience has shown it to be unreliable.
Rock Solid August 16, 2008
Bob Singleton (West Molesey, Surrey)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I just keep buying these!
Rock solid performance, easy set up. I now have 4 or 5 of these to store photos, videos and for backups of my laptop's hard drive.
No doubt I'll be buying a few more as and when my storage requirements dictate.
BEWARE the Click of Death! August 13, 2008
Matteus
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
Had this 6 months and it died suddenly - whenever I tried to connect it or power it up I got 3 slow clicking noises followed by 3 more then nothing....drive no longer found.
Whilst I had some DVD backups burned I was keen to try and get my most recent data off it. The recovery & replacement are expensive. WD support is automated and useless.
Luckily I found a method of getting the drive out of the case on Ransackery.com and while doing so noted that a large number of other owners have experienced the same problem. Turns out the power and USB connectors are less than robust according to posts on FixYa.
As a reasonably fearless person when it comes to opening up hardware I was able to recover everything and in fact I still use the internal disk drive itself as it's fine once connected to my PC which permanently has its case open anyway.
God forbid anyone non-technical should use this for backing up critical business data. I will steer well clear of WD products in future.
Absolutely brilliant! August 2, 2008
Sue Whitehead (London)
My oldish PC (which runs XP) was really struggling as it was full to the gills with stuff, and I bought this to free up the hard drive. I have a load of photos and music on the PC now, although it was originally used just for Word and Excel documents.
Despite the reviews on here, I really doubted that the PC would be able to cope with an external hard drive.
But as soon as I connected it, it immediately recognised it, and I've had no trouble at all moving files over via Windows Explorer (I found it easiest to drag and drop, and then delete the files from the PC - cutting and pasting sometimes caused error messages to say a file was in use elsewhere).
It is all taking quite a while, but mainly due to the sheer volume of stuff I have to transfer.
Basically I'm delighted - so far!
I'm not too worried about the (surely very slight) risk of this hard drive failing as all my stuff is backed up on Carbonite anyway - I bought this solely to free up my PC but still have easy access to what is on it, which this does perfectly :)
I must also praise Amazon's Prime free trial - I ordered this product at 4.45pm one afternoon, and it arrived by Royal Mail at 9.30am the following morning - amazing!!!
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