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By lifting mine while defragging, it caused Windows Defragmenter to crash, which is the first time in 16 years' of computer ownership I've seen that happen.Did I mention S-L-O-W. What kind of reliability are we talking about, when someone who likes the drive doesn't even trust it. Not just slow to write through the USB bus, but slow to format, slow to defrag, slow to SHRED critical data with DOD Delete. Really, I wonder whether I got one of the USB 2.0 ones, or if this is an older model 1.0. Bought it about a year ago and have kept it in my fire safe to have a worst-case safe copy if the rest of the place goes up. Some have been in continuous service since 2003.But this outboard "My Book" seems to be a completely different creature.For one thing it's agonizingly slow. And a not-so-happy owner of one of these.
To do so risks your data. My two SATA WD's are 300 GB drives and must be 8 times faster to defrag or reformat. Not even in the same league, not even in the same city as this external drive. It does not have a power switch, which indicates the newer model, and has the two vertical blue strip LED's, so I guess it is one of the newer ones. What's that tell you. At least it hasn't completely pooped out (yet). Wondering now whether this was a good choice.If I had to do it over again, I would have obtained a firewire external box and placed an OEM Western Digital drive in it.
:-)OK so here's my Big Tip Of The Day: Do not move this drive around while it is writing.
The ones I really like are the internal drives, have 3 PATA and two SATA WD's and those have been real champs, with no failures at all over all this time.
Here's how slow that is: I set up this 750G My Book to SHRED the 400G igs of empty space on the drive (overwriting empty space with just one pass of zero's) and went to bed.
Do not move it at all, don't tilt it, bump, lift or anything.
Or just keep shopping.
For the moderately "tekkie" inclined, that would be the way to go.
I am a very happy owner of several WD hard drives.
7 hours later, it wasn't even 1/4 done.The other thing that makes me nervous about this drive is all of the "It died" comments and even the positive reviewer who advised to backup the backup.
This is the pee-wee league here.
The physical appearance can make it seem like a book on your library. I believe it's a reasonable price for the amount of space. It's a really nice hard drive. It's really great that it's intelligent enough so that it powers on when it's connected to the laptop and when you disconnect it it powers off, so you don't need to be connecting the power of the hard drive.
Encrypted and formatted it with ext4. Blew away the existing file system and Windows junk included on the disk. It just works fine. Using it as a backup drive for my Debian Linux machine (kernel 2.6.32-trunk-amd64). Created a new GPT with parted.
You can even upgrade the drive in them, once you figure out how to open the case. Recommend it. These are excellent - reliable, fast, easy to connect. It is a little bulky, but probably has better cooling that way.
This is great backup drive. We've had ours for over a year with no problems.
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