Western Digital My Book Essential 2 TB,External (WDBACW0020HBK-NESN) Hard Drive

I bought this drive to serve as backup for two computers, and for the use of USB 3.0. To my surprise, the drive is actually kinda slow. I'm not sure what the spindle speed is, but I would guess it's probably only 5400rpm. However, that is not to say its always slow. For some reason, Western Digital seems to have designed this drive only to be used with USB 3.0. The 2.0 speeds float around 10MB/sec (despite the fact that 2.0 can handle up to 50MB/sec). That said, I've been able to get around 100MB/sec and a max of 320MB/sec with 3.0, thus my belief that WD intended consumers to use 3.0 with this drive. In addition, I would not recommend this drive to someone who truly wants to use it as a "portable" drive (ie plug n play between lots of computers) due to the fact that for the drive to run at full-speed you must load a special driver onto every machine. The annoyance comes from the fact that you must reload/reinstall this driver every time. Furthermore, if you run the included WD Backup Software, you must then use that software to eject the drive before you can unplug. Another slight annoyance is the existence of a seemingly non-functional power button on the back. I've never had to use it, and when I've tried, it seems not to do anything. Perhaps mine is faulty, or perhaps WD had some inane purpose for this button, but decided to leave it as a vestigial feature.

Actually, I already had one. Second one I bought only because heads on my old one stopped working. I bought second one to use its parts to recovery information from my first hard drive.
First one, exactly same hard drive, died after 3 month. I bought it in Target, and I know that they still have many hard drives like that in stores. Although I recovered very important information from my hard drive, I lost the rest of it (almost 250gb).
I read many negative review after that, and I found that many people around the world had problems with this type of hard drives (WD Caviar Green).
DO NOT USE THIS HARD DRIVE FOR BACKUP FILES!
If your one still work, it could die really soon... =(

This is an excellent external harddrive with alot of room to store your favorite pcitures, music and videos. I have a smaller version of a western digital external hard drive and I have found these to be high quality pieces of equipment. No crashes or loss of information!

Thanks, it´s perfect, I am using for my backups and so far works perfectly well, The only thing is the size, would be good to try out new smaller products

Great value for the product.I recently bought my Essential External drive and have love how easy it is!! So simple and easy to use.The best thing I like