Product Description

The WDG1U7500N MyBook Essential Edition External Hard Drive is small, simple, elegant and very easy to use. Simply plug it in and you have room to back up your valuable data, music, photos and movies. Intelligent drive management features MyBook drive turns itself on and off with your computer. The elegant book design case takes up less space on your desk and allows two or more drives to stand neatly together like volumes on a shelf. Exceptionally fast while ultra quiet & cool running, the MyBook Essential Edition External Hard Drive includes Free Google software to search your drive, manage your photos and simplify Web searches.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20997 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Western Digital
• Model: WDG1U7500N
• Platforms: Macintosh, Windows
• Format: CD
• Dimensions: 8.00" h x 4.50" w x 11.63" l, 2.90 pounds
• Hard Disk: 750GB

Features

• Easy to set up, easy to use -- This drive is all about simplicity. Plug it into your computer's USB 2.0 port and start saving.
• Intelligent drive management features -- The My Book drive turns itself on and off with your computer.
• Smart design -- The elegant case, iconic of a book, takes up less space on your desk, stacks horizontally, and allows two or more drives to stand neatly together like volumes on a shelf.
• High quality hard drive -- Inside the case is an exceptionally fast, ultra quiet, cool-running hard drive from Western Digital.
• Free Google software -- Search your drive, manage your photos, and simplify Web searches with included Google software. Note: Google software is compatible with Windows 2000 and XP only.

Customer Reviews

Flakey from the start
I bought this several years ago, and it was unstable and unreliable from the get-go. I've wished for a long time that I'd returned it immediately.

I've never been able to get this hard drive to connect reliably. Plug it in, attach the USB cord and... toss a coin. Heads, it will mount, tails, it will not make its presence known to the computer. I'm relatively certain that something is loose in there.

It came in very handy when its big brother failed completely (the six month old MyBook 1TB I eventually upgraded to) - some of the data that wasn't backed up elsewhere was still lingering on this one in the closet. Took several attempts to get it to mount, but once it did I found the data.

I'll never buy another WD product.


- Back up your data. You'll save yourself a LOT of headache.

Failed After One Year
I'm one of those people who reads reviews were hardware fails, and thinks, "Well, they just weren't handling the hardware correctly."

I'm super-careful with my hardware, so I thought I'd have no problem with this drive.

When the drive failed, I wasn't even in the country. I was away from home for two months, accessing the computer this drive was connected to via Remote Desktop. One day I tried to access files on the drive, only to discover the the drive seemed to be empty.

A few weeks later, on returning home and reconnecting the drive, everything seemed to be working fine, but that was the beginning of the end. The drive would just "drop connection" from my XP machine, resulting in a "Delayed Write Error" message.

I switched it to my Windows Vista machine, and it worked a bit better, but still would drop the connection after a few minutes of use. Eventually it began to take down Windows Explorer with it, requiring a reboot of the machine.

Tonight I spent a few hours, slowly moving my most important data from the drive. It stalled on a number of files, freezing the machine and corrupting the files that were unfortunate enough to be in the process of transfering when the drive stalled.

I lost some data, but with patience I was able to move most of my data to other drives on my network.

I'm still waiting to hear back from WD support. I'm pretty sure my warranty is over, since I think I bought this drive just over a year ago.

I guess it is just a hunk of garbage now, since I don't have a spare tower machine to move the hard disk itself into (there are sites online that explain how to remove the drive from its case and install it as an internal drive).

I'm going to avoid Western Digital for a while. My LaCie drive (two years old) is still running with no issues.

Makes noise and went bad after a year
I had a WD and mine was pretty noisy at times. The drive went bad after a year. About four months after the manufacturer warranty. I had to pay 1,500 to retrieve my data. Found out it was a bad controller. Anyway I am now using LaCie Drives. I realize that sometimes there are bad batches of drives. But at least with LaCie they give you a 3 YEAR WARRANTY on their drives.