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  • Overall Rating
    5 stars 5 Star Review
    Reviewed by: aac7113

    Updated:09-13-06

    Duration of ownership:

    Strengths: Everything: Design, Speed, Ventilation, Capacity, Accessories, Software

    Weaknesses: None

    Overall Evaluation: It's just an amazing drive. It brings all the cables for each interface. Its pretty light and doesn't get very hot. The software is very useful. The speeds are amazing. Its just awesome. I would recommend it to those that really need the space and speed but can afford it.

  • Overall Rating
    5 stars 5 Star Review
    Reviewed by: jack_bunce

    Updated:08-26-06

    Duration of ownership:3 Days

    Strengths: Price, Firewire-800, three year warranty

    Weaknesses: Not to crazy about the design.

    Overall Evaluation: I bought this drive mainly because it features Firewire-800, which if you haven't tried it is the best, that and the fact it was the only one in it's price range with a 3 year warranty. I used diskmgmt. to reformat and partition the drive with NTFS. If I have to use the warranty, WD has a well respected name, and their on line support seems very good.

  • Overall Rating
    4 stars 4 Star Review
    Reviewed by: bzlman

    Updated:08-23-06

    Duration of ownership:

    Strengths: Blazing Fast Firewire 800 (observed 27 MegaBYTES/sec). Huge Storage, connects easily with Old/New Macs and PCs. Fairly stylish (I guess, if that kind of thing is important to you).

    Weaknesses: See Comments

    Overall Evaluation: I have been very satisfied with the drive itself so far. The read/write speed is very good in general. I have not tested every port to both Macs and Windows, but here is what I have: USB 2.0 to windows is very good, to Mac not too bad either (tested at about 15 megaBYTES/sec). Firewire 400 to Mac is quite good, but Firewire 800 makes this special--27 megaBYTES/sec! observed for a 3.75 GB transferred both to and from drive. The one caveat I have has nothing to with the drive itself, but with the inability for mac and windows harddrives to play nice with each other, which reduces the usefullness of this kind of drive. The drive is pre-formatted to FAT32 which both mac and windows can read nicely, and can theoretically both be booted off. However, FAT32 doesn't seem to be able to handle a transfer of files bigger than 4 GB (I tried and it kept failing in the middle), so if you have big movie projects (like I do), you will have to reformat it, which is where the problem starts. It possible, with some effort to "hack" the drive to have both an HFS+ (mac format that handles bigger files, but is invisible to windows) and FAT32 (to connect it to windows). However, the drive will then not be bootable, which makes it much less useful for a backup. My solution is to format it to HFS+, and use the program MacDrive to have windows be able to use the disk. If you don't need the disk to handle huge individual files and/or be bootable, great, if not, be aware that this issue exists. Otherwise a great product, and Firewire daisy chaining makes managing a few drive a cinch.

  • Overall Rating
    5 stars 5 Star Review
    Reviewed by: gatetraveler

    Updated:06-27-06

    Duration of ownership:

    Strengths: Excellent Price. Triple Interface. Great Access Speed. Cool Blue indicator.

    Weaknesses: None off hand.

    Overall Evaluation: I bought this product to keep my digital photos and backups on. Also an easy way to be able to share files between the Mac OS and Windows on my MacBook Pro. Mainly to be used for storage not to much high data access. But the speeds offered are great due to firewire 800. I would recommend this product to all photography and digital video users. Western Digital is a quality company that focuses heavily on Hard Drives and very good support.

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WD My Book Pro External 500GB Hard Drive
$263.20 • •Specs
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