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I'll never buy a Western Digital hard drive again.
I have two of these hard drives. I originally bought them because you couldn't beat the price. I use one as a storage backup and one as a short term backup. I trusted that my storage backup would be there in case the short term back up went out. Not the case. I went to plug it up and found that it had starting clicking though it worked perfectly last time I backed up my data on it. This clicking problem is apparently a very common sign of hard drive failure. It is toast unless I want to pay out the wazoo to get my data recovered by a professional service. Now here I am with no back up of my data since BOTH Western Digital My Books have failed. The worst part is that they are 3 weeks out of warranty. It is ridiculous to think that even if you backup frequently and do everything they say to do, your data can still disappear forever. I guess you get what you pay for.

I recommend carefully reading many reviews and likely problems before you purchase a hard drive made by Western Digital. This company has really let us down.

THIS TOOL IS DOING THE JOB
I AM NOT A SPECIALIST AT COMPUTERS SO I DID NOT EVEN KNOW WHAT AN EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE WAS. A GOOD FRIEND SHOWED ME HIS. I LEARNED I COULD BACK UP MY COMPUTER IN AUTOMATIC MODE.
I FOUND THIS MODEL ON AMAZON.COM AND SENT FOR IT. THE DAY IT ARRIVED I HOOKED IT TO MY COMPUTER. THE INSTRUCTIONS WERE EASY FOR EVEN A DIM ONE LIKE ME. IT WORKS. I AM HAPPY SO THANK YOU WESTERN DIGITAL AND AMAZON.

Great with Macs
Wow. I got this think for $90 at Office Max. I couldn't decide between this model or another more portable alternative, My Passport. I chose this, because I needed a place to store all my hundreds of movies, songs, and files. Because I have a mac, I don't need to bother with the included (mediocre) software, I just use Time Machine (which comes with the mac.) This drive works like a charm, and it is very silent. I have freed so much space up on my computer, that I now have room for my school files. If you are in high school, and want a place to put your movies, get the Mybook. It is sexy, cheap, and you can't go wrong with Western Digital.

Great supplier, good product
The product was just as it was described. It came in a timely manner and works great!

Good value for the money
The WD 500gb "My Book" is a perfect solution for desktop backup. I use mine attached to a NSLU2 as one of a pair. It's said that if you don't have a backup, you really don't have anything - and I agree. Every night, every machine on my network backs up important files to the NSLU2 and one of these drives. I then have the drives copy to each other - essentially resulting in three copies of everything. So I'm a bit OCD.
They are quiet, seem to be reliable (what drive isn't reliable till it fails?) and at around a hundred bucks for 500gb, very reasonably priced. I just purchased the second and I plan to add a third, probably the 1tb model, to another box soon.
Keep in mind when you see people giving one star cause the drive puked that every single manufacturer produces the occasional bad unit. You won't find any of these types of drives with a perfect rating - hence the idea of maintaining multiple copies. I'd like to add a blu-ray drive to my machine at some point in the future and add hard copy backups that way.
Recommended!