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Re-tried FireWire connection (faster and works better with audio and video), and Vista reloaded drivers and now the drive works fine. These are good drives (even the refurbished one which I bought),however software and driver issues may cause problems. Tried USB and drive finally came up. I plan to buy another triple interface drive and daisy chain it off my existing one.
I decided to lay the drives on their sides to let air flow through the enclosure (top and bottom) which may help keep them a little cooler. Tons of work ripping CDs, recording cassettes and albums. Check WD site's support knowledge base as there is some useful information. Windows hotfix supposed to fix problem (not). Use it as my music library. Problem with FireWire after 14 months of use. Drive finally would not come up in Vista. I have three WD drives (2 USB only 500G and 1 TB triple interface).
Would not waste my time calling. I have been using my 1 TB drive for the last year with no problems. Kept getting blue screen of death when computer went to sleep. They all are working great.
I believe somebody on technical side in WD did very poor job. It shows 13mb/s or 104 mbits/sec. I believe reliability and throughput are 2 most important parameters for external drive. of frequently advertised throughput on box of 480mbits/sec as usb 2.0 ability.My other 2 compact drives which are not using external power supply but usb port fire 20mb/sec.Still too slow but at least better than this one.Other then that - case, printing materials, workmanship are excellent. Hi guys.All things are good about this drive BUT speed of writing. I am not sure how important it is for somebody. This device produces less than 25%.
Just plug in and go. These drives are reliable and tough. Only external drives I like. I needed to upgrade my dated 250GB my book I've had for years since it was full. Never had a single problem.
Just plug it in (Windows XP) and you have a terabyte to use as you like. I can't say much about any included software - I dumped anything that came with the drive as I have had poor experiences in the past. In my experience this is a good product. It doesn't get much simpler.
I then ran a couple of tests with the various interfaces. I have only been using the drive for about a week, but so far, I have had none of the problems that others have mentioned. I'm not sure what problem they had, but I have it plugged into a surge-protected UPS without any problem.I can't attest to how well it will perform over a period of time, but so far, it has worked very well for me. the formatting and partitioning took me less than five minutes. It came with both a USB and firewire cable, both of which worked. Transferring a file that was slightly over 1GB took 43sec on the USB, 40sec with firewire and using the eSATA (you have to buy that cable separately) was only 19sec. Yes, depending on which interface you are using, the drive may shut off if your computer goes to sleep, but starting it back up was as simple as pushing the power button on the back.
I have found it works fine for both. And in the reverse, if it didn't shut off when you closed down the computer, you simply push the power button and hold it for a few seconds and it powers off. The first thing I did was re-format to NTFS (it comes as FAT32) I also broke it down into 3 partitions - I only did that for my particular use, you don't need to partition the drive. However, because of the easy return policy and great price, I decided to take a chance. The unit runs quietly. I read one review that said it took hours to reformat.
As they say, your times may vary, but this at least gave me a sense of which interface I wanted to use. I also read how several people complained that it couldn't be plugged into a surge-protected power strip. After reading all the negative reviews, I was a little reluctant about purchasing the drive. I'm working off a PC running Vista Home 64bit. If you are going to be doing a lot of transferring or backing up files, it's probably worth investing in the eSATA cable.For the short time I have had it, I have used it both for backing up a fairly large set of files (70GB) as well as an auxiliary drive with files I may need to access daily.
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