WD 1TB mybook essential

**athenaesword** · 03-06-2008, 02:42 PM

thinking of gettin this for only 200bucks. i've heard somewhere before though that it restricts sharing of media files. anyoen can confirm this?

any feedback or recommendations on this is also welcome. if you've got comments on the 500gb as well i'd be glad to hear it.

**clocker** · 03-06-2008, 03:18 PM

Although I have no direct personal experience with these things, it seems that we see a lot of people complaining about them, so I'd be wary.

I think the best way to go is just get the drive of your choice and put it in an external enclosure.
That way you needn't deal with the foibles of someone else's software.
If you get a SATAII drive and an enclosure that supports eSATA, your transfer rates will be much faster than a USB interface as well.

Win, win.

**athenaesword** · 03-06-2008, 05:27 PM

well it's 200bucks for a 1tb external drive, so i'm thinking it's a pretty damned good deal.

i can remove the enclosure and put it in another one if i wanted to, but i don't see the point. its' mainly for all the HD movies that take up motherloads of space.

what i can't deal with though is that i can't share my files with these. that'd put me in a spot.

**clocker** · 03-06-2008, 05:56 PM

Originally Posted by athenaesword

well it's 200bucks for a 1tb external drive, so i'm thinking it's a pretty damned good deal.

Indeed.
The cheapest SATA 1TB drive at Newegg right now is @$240 so what quality drive do think WD is throwing at this thing for $40 less (including the enclosure AND software)?

Seems to me that many of these seemingly great external drive deals must be using bottom of the barrel drives to meet their pricepoint.
I would also think that the backup drive would be the one drive you'd make sure was good since you're counting on it to store your data, so splurging here would make sense.

Then again, it's not MY money.

**athenaesword** · 03-06-2008, 11:49 PM

Originally Posted by clocker

Originally Posted by athenaesword

well it's 200bucks for a 1tb external drive, so i'm thinking it's a pretty damned good deal.

Indeed.
The cheapest SATA 1TB drive at Newegg right now is @$240 so what quality drive do think WD is throwing at this thing for $40 less (including the enclosure AND software)?

Seems to me that many of these seemingly great external drive deals must be using bottom of the barrel drives to meet their pricepoint.
I would also think that the backup drive would be the one drive you'd make sure was good since you're counting on it to store your data, so splurging here would make sense.

Then again, it's not MY money.

hmm a couple of guys have opened theirs up and they're 1tb sata drives. it's some kind of IT fair here so they're having these promotions. they're 16mb 7200rpm, accordign to the ppl who've opened them up.

**clocker** · 03-07-2008, 01:10 AM

Interesting.

I wonder if WD is using recertified drives...not that there's anything wrong with that.

**athenaesword** · 03-07-2008, 05:52 AM

i think the catch is that these might be 5400rpm drives instead of 7200rpm.

Originally Posted by http://www.silentpcreview.com/article786-page2.html
(Link)It's quite simple, really. Most of a drive's power is consumed by the motor that spins the disk inside the drive. Reduce the speed of the disk, and you reduce the amount of power required. However, Western Digital doesn't want to say that they're selling 5,400 RPM drives — those became second class in the desktop market years ago. Instead, they rate the drive's speed as "IntelliPower" and take pains to emphasize that there are other factors that affect performance.

Western Digital has caught a lot of flak for withholding the rotation speed of the Green Power, especially when the product was first launched and the marketing material listed the rotation speed as 5,400-7,200 RPM. This led some to speculate that the rotation speed changed dynamically during use — which would have been an impressive engineering feat had it been true. The reality is revealed by a sentence that Western Digital added to the description of IntelliPower: "For each GreenPower™ drive model, WD may use a different, invariable RPM." In other words, Western Digital reserves the right to release both 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM drives under the Green Power name — without telling you which are which.

however in terms of real performance i don't think we'll see much of a difference. i'm abit disappointed that they're so unwilling to come right out and say it though. but there's no doubt that this's still the highest gb/dollar ratio to be had yet.