 "Great 1TB Drive from Western Digital" | 2009-11-18 |
| - Reviewed By User: A31UILGU7B56SO |
I own it for two weeks now, and so far it is the best western digital drive I ever owned. I have 4 ealier 500GB drives, and I was happy with them. and as soon as I heard about this 1TB drive, I planned to buy it immediately, but DID NOT. Why? because of those bad reviews written by others. They were very convencing. But somehow I have 20+ years believe in WD products quality so I bought it and below are my reply to the raised concerns:
1- USB connecter 2.0:
yes it is a new interface, but believe me, I hardly can unplug it from the HDD! contradict what people are saying! it is very tightly secure in the drive without any loose problems! may be they have change it recently! but I am very happy with the connection
2- WD software:
Western digital website already published a firmware update to remove (hide) their annoying CD partition for their new software. so basicly this problem is history.
I am using this drive in both windows 7 and Mac Book Pro, and it is working like magic in both computers with full capacity of 999GB (yes I have reclaimed the full hard disk size after using the new firmware)
don't make my earlier mistake and do buy this great 1TB drive ... it is really small size and worth the money for it
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 "Drive good, cable is rubbish, cables should be recalled or replaced by WD" | 2009-11-17 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2H7DGMVMQ12LX |
| It is pretty neat to get so much space on something so small. I bought several of the 500Gb versions and also two of the 1Tb versions. They seem to get the USB micro cables from two different suppliers. The 500Gb ones are useless as they keep falling out and this causes problems as we are using them as storage when we are editing videos. The solution seems to be to buy the 1Tb versions as these cables fit much better in either of the sizes, so it is the cable not the drive. Tried reporting the problem to WD but UK organisation not interested and passed me on to the USA technical team who didn't even respond to their own UK email from their own people. We have now went out and bought the older model for our editing and trying to buy some leads from someone else for the 500Gb drives we already bought. |
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 "Another great hard drive from WD" | 2009-11-15 |
| - Reviewed By User: AGL2PCX0SS44K |
I've always been a fan of Western Digital's drives, whether external or internal. And this certainly doesn't change my opinions. Great external hard drive, very large storage capacity. The only problem that I have and continue to have is the USB connector. It never stays in like it should, it always feels like I have to hold it in. This is extremely annoying when transferring large files, as if I even move the drive, the transfer will fail. I don't know if this is just my drive or not, it should not be a reason to not get the drive.
Extremely worth the money. Just a side note, if your not a fan of WD's bundled software, then this drive will annoy you alot. WD's Drive Management Software is built in to the firmware of the drive (formatting won't uninstall it), and whenever you plug it into a Windows or Mac computer, will load itself up and ask to back up the drive. You can block this on individual computers, but not for the drive itself.
Overall great drive, WD says they are working on a tool to remove their bundled software, and if this drive lacked that software, and the USB connector was just little more stable, this drive would receive a 6/5 for me. For now, gonna have to say 4/5, sorry WD!
Oh, and it looks amazing too. =]
Well.. until you touch it.. |
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| "Huge space but USB connection makes this a bad product" | 2009-11-13 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3H90I92ICJ4NB |
| I was excited for the extra space on this new Western Digital HDD. When I received it, I realized the connection cable to the drive was not a standard USB mini cable. The supplied cable is very short in length and has a great tendency to work itself loose all the time making it very frustrating to actually copy stuff onto this drive. I've actually resorted to taping the connector into place. I would not have purchased this product had I known this in advance. |
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 "A really big hard drive" | 2009-11-04 |
| - Reviewed By User: A13SFD1S2XQYK3 |
I purchased this drive because I have a huge photo and music library. I also thought that this drive could be a swap for an internal laptop drive.
First the pros. It is one terabyte and fairly fast. I wish it was available with firewire as it seems to top out at about 12Mb/sec on transfers
The cons. It has a different USB connector than the mini usb connector with earlier WD portable 2.5 inch drives. Now, that means I need yet another cable that to use this drive.
It comes with a non erasable partition that functions as a virtual CD with software for both Mac and PC for backup and security. I guess that enough people complained about this "feature" that WD published a firmware update and a program that will dismount this virtual CD. I haven't tried it.
The hard drive is 12.5 mm form factor, which would work in my laptop. However, there is a custom controller board with ONLY a usb interface. This is not a SATA drive. So, unlike prior generations of the WD portable hard drives which were laptop drives with a usb bridge board, there is no way to use this drive in a laptop. You ( I ) will have to shell out the extra 50 dollars for a 1tb laptop drive with the correct interface.
I was able to wipe and reformat the drive and it does boot Snow Leopard for my laptop. I was able to back up my laptop, and all my music and photos and still have about 550 Gb left over. I know that it will be more expensive, but I will get the firewire 800 version of this drive, if it ever comes out. |
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| "Low-power, low-heat, a bit of vibration though ..." | 2009-10-30 |
| - Reviewed By thebs413 |
1) The cable is standard USB Micro-B ([...]). Micro-B has many advantages over the prior Mini-B, and the standard B has never been an option for 2.5" (or Blackberry or countless other, small devices).
2) It's the 3 x 333GB/platter, 2.5"x12mm design, for 999.5GB (930GiB). Suprisingly it's low-power and low-heat compared to my Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB and earlier Western Digital drives. However, I'm noting far more vibration. It's literally barely larger than the 2.5"x12mm inside, not as "long" as other 2.5" external drives, although clearly the extra 2.5mm of the drive makes it another 5mm (half cm) high overall.
3) Western Digital isn't the first vendor to include utilities in NAND EEPROM on a device. I have flash drives that do this as well. The diagnostics and support utilities are included in a device that looks like read-only optical drive #4 in the OS (e.g., CD-ROM #3 in Windows, with #0 being first, sr3 in Linux, sr0 being first). Frankly, I don't mind it. If you don't like it, use Windows' Disk Manager to change the drive letter. E.g., I use T: for the disk, W: for the utility image. My _only_ issue was that Western Digital did _not_ get their driver signed by Microsoft -- that's a _major_ oversight (so 3 stars).
4) No issues with Linux whatsoever (5 stars). In fact I only use the first 128GiB (137GB) for FAT32, cylinders 1-8192 (255/63 heads/sectors), which works with anything that supports FAT32 and even old 28-bit ATA (with the 8192cyl/128GiB/137GB limitation). The rest of the disk I use for UDF (which most Windows versions can at least read, and NT6 aka Vista/2008/7 can write as well) and Ext3 (Linux).
5) I don't recommend NTFS as it was never designed to be exchanged between systems, and you can only safely do such between Windows Server Domain Controllers of the same domain (long story) -- and Windows doesn't have a "read-only" mount option like Linux (let alone the Linux NTFS3g driver is safer than writing to NTFS from a Windows system that didn't create it). This option continues to be overlooked by Microsoft, while they are finishing off the new FAT standard. They should just support UDF better, and at least do a decent job with UDF 2.5 support in NT6 aka Vista/2008/7.
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Expedited Available
