Western Digital WDG1C3200N My Book Premium Edition 320 GB USB 2.0/Firewire400 External Hard Drive

I can see why this product had a 1-year warranty. I bought it in February '07, it worked great for a while, then started to fail in March-April '08, and by June '08 is completely dead. If you're going to buy a WD drive, get one with a 3- or 5-year warranty. Or buy a different brand.

I bought this drive as an external storage unit. I set it up as an encrypted drive in Windows XP. Even when encrypted the drive is fast. Ok, not fast enough for video editing but for basic tasks. The drive looks good and it's small so it doesn't take up much room.One day I enter my password to access the encrypted drive and nothing happens. The next day at bootup the drive just clicks nonstop. It wasn't even recognized by the BIOS. I got it to be recognized once but it can't be accessed. I've tried everything.The drive inside the unit is a Western Digital SATA drive. 3200JS. I'm not sure what could have happened. Perhaps it overheated. This is the first time I ever had a drive die on me. Strangely, a week before I had a Maxtor drive on a dedicated (remote) server.I lost 200gb of data on this drive and did not back it up. I just can't believe the drive lasted only six months. Maybe even less. Maybe it's still under warranty. I just know that if I buy another external drive it will be a larger one with a fan and a way to cool itself better. Maybe that's not what happened. Also, I do take good care of my drives. I use defrag and scan utilities every week or so.

As for the hard drive itself, I'm quite impressed. It is very fast and behaves just like another hard drive.The difference between the Premium Edition and the Essential Edition is about $50 for which you get the WD Backup software. The Backup software needs some significant improvements to compare to other products like Acronis True Image, which just so happens to cost $50. While WDBackup provides scheduled backups, encrypted backups, incremental backups, and advanced backups (select exactly which files/folders to backup), the following deficiencies are not acceptable:1. Cannot view or edit an existing scheduled backup. You have to delete it and create a new one.2. Cannot backup networked drives.If I had to do it again, I would have bought the Essential Edition and purchased a much better backup software package.

This external hard drive was a great addition to my PC. 2 months after I started using it, my PC hard drive crashed. Since I run a small business with the PC, this was potentially devastating. After installing a new HD, I recovered within a couple of days because I had my data backed up. I highly recommend backing up, at least daily. This is an easy way to do it because you can schedule when and what type of backup you want either manual or automatic. The only warning I have is that there is not a lot of documentation that comes with the unit and the online support is not easy to access.

Picked this up here on Amazon from J&R Music for $108 after shipping. I could not be happier. The price was fantastic and the product works great. I reformatted to NTFC because I needed support for 10+GB movie files (there are step-by-step formatting instructions on the Western Digital website for those of you who -- like me -- may be novices). No problems with that. No problems with the USB or Firewire interfaces either. Both my desktop and laptop detected the drive without a hitch.Buy it at this price before they're gone.

I bought the WD "My Book" external hard drive because it was on sale and it had SO MUCH memory. I didn't expect the thing to go buggy on me right away. The first thing WD's "My Book" did was to "drop" itself from my PC. It was always wandering off somewhere where my OS couldn't find it. I kept on having to disconnect it and connect it just to use it. The drive has decided - after these many weeks of losing itself in the ether - to stick around. How long will it stay? That's impossible to say."My Book" (when its working) is noisy. It's as if the drive wants to be a turbojet when it grows up. It does get quiet between its tantrums, however, which is, I suppose, a redeeming quality.In addition, "My Book" has a nasty tendency to embed itself so deeply into the inner workings its host PC that the user can hardly do anything without it "spinning up." Even surfing the net can be negatively impacted by "My Book." Files are often directed without the user's volition or knowledge to this blue-eyed cyclops. Considering the data retrieval times associated with the drive, depositing critical files in the beastie is not a good thing.WD's "My Book" can be best described as a noisy vampiric tumor. It invades its PC host and degrades its performance. Still want all that memory?

If you like having the wool pulled over your eyes, don't pay attention to the big sticker on the packaging that says '320 GB'. It's not. It's 298 GB. After looking around the WD site a little, their footnote in listing it's supposed 320 GB capacity is this:"This capacity is reported using the decimal numbering system (1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes and 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes). Both Windows and Macintosh operating systems use the binary numbering system, which results in a lower reported capacity".In my eyes this is just short of false advertising. I'll take mine back. Not sure how the other hard drive manufacturers do it but I feel swindled. Other than that, it's a nice little box, very quiet and attractive. But not 320 GB.

I've only had this drive a short time, but so far I've had no problems. The 500GB MyBook received some less than favorable reviews, so I purchased the 320GB drive. It was easy to set up, and the included backup software is convenient and simple to configure. At first I had it connected to my computer by USB, but when I purchased a Firewire card to connect a digital movie camera, I reconnected the MyBook drive to Firewire without a problem. I strongly recommend an external hard drive for daily backups and an occasional disk image, and the Western Digital MyBook 320 GB drive is a good choice.