Western Digital My Book External Hard Drive
My son has recently joined the computer world with his purchase of an Acer Aspire notebook and has been setting up his system with good old dad’s help. We have a stand for the notebook for ease of use and viewing while he has the notebook at home at his desk. He has a USB hub with a Microsoft keyboard and mouse for comfort instead of the notebooks keyboard. And for backup and more storage he now has the USB connected My Book external hard drive. And it was really easy to start up and connect. The drive has true plug and play features. We hooked up the power cord and the USB cord and the computer recognized it, ran through some install thing and it was ready to go in less than a minute.
Western Digital is recognizing that people want ease of use and easy to connect hardware and granted users this in their new line of external hard drives. The MY Book series includes smaller sized drives such as the 80 Gigabyte up to the 500 Gigabyte size in three different editions. The Essentials series is a no frills easy to use external hard drive for whatever you need an extra drive for. Storage, backup or a temporary drive for video editing is right at your finger tips and so easy to use. The Essentials series comes in 80 up to 500 Gigabyte sizes.
The Premium series of external hard drives has from 160 to 500 gigabytes capacity with a couple of extra features above the Essentials series. The Premium series has the extra firewire connection and on the front inside the power on indicator you have a circular capacity gauge to show you how much data is on your drive at a glance. The Pro series just introduced has an extra feature above and beyond the Essentials and Premium series. The Pro series comes in 250 and 500 Gigabyte sizes with 400 and 800 speed firewire connections along with the USB 2.0 hookup. The 400 firewire is the standard firewire while the 800 is a relatively newer type that simply transmits data at 800 megabytes per second instead of the standard 400 Mbps. The Pro series also has the capacity gauge on the front to show you how full or empty the drive is at a glance.
Western Digital has the usual warranty for hardware like this, 1 year for it’s external hard drive lines. The drives all have some good specifications for the price your paying. If you want a good price along with good specifications you can count on Western Digital. For more information and an explanation of the specifications of each drive you are interested in purchasing go to the WD site and they have a handy explanation of hard drive terms to explain the things like drive RPM’s and seek times. The site has some very good explanations of their drives and what the different things mean in terms you can understand. http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=232
The Essential My Book hard drive comes with the USB 2.0 cord and the power cord with the power adapter on it. It also comes with some bundled software from Google and Adobe if you’re interested in installing it on your system. The Google software is a toolbar addition to your internet explorer, a search tool for your desktop and Picasa, Googles picture software. The Adobe is a current version of Adobe Reader to view the readme information and manual for the drive that comes on the drive. The software bundle comes in at 57 Megabytes so doesn’t take up much room, you can also delete it from the hard drive if you like. It only takes up a small space but can quickly be gotten rid of. Oh, did I mention that the hard drive does NOT come with a CD. There is no installation CD or any kind of drivers that you need to worry about. The drive comes ready to go fully formatted and the only time you would need to do anything is if you would like to partition the drive to have more than one virtual drive for your system.
Partitioning a drive is easy to do and in some cases very handy for users. If you want to have different sections or areas of a drive and have them show up on your system as different drives you can do this by what is called partitioning. You run a small program and let your computer break off a portion of the hard drive and your system will show this up as a different drive while physically being part of the same hard drive.
This is done for a variety of reasons, for instance on my son’s notebook the hard drive is partitioned into two halves, one for programs and one for storage. This keeps the programs and such from being on the same part of the drive as data. Defragmenting the drives is broken up into two operations and having the two sections of the drive separated from each other works best for notebooks. Program areas should be kept from the data area for best performance of your drive. On my desktop the C: or main drive has a partition for a recovery section so that I can recover my system without a separate disc or CD. I can just go to the partition and run recover or restore from there. For an external drive especially for the larger sized drives it would be handy to partition and keep different kinds of data separate such as having one area for data storage and another for a temporary area for video editing. This keeps the very different kinds of data and information on different parts of the drive and more organized.
Western Digital has been a leading manufacturer of disc drives for over 30 years and has been making drives for desktop and notebook computers as well as console gaming systems. Their lines of both external and internal drives has been changing to meet the demanding specifications of ever increasing technologies in computers and the ever increasing customer demands as well. I personally have three external hard drives sitting beside my home computers showing the range of physical drives and the changing demands customers have cried for and WD has given. My first drive is a no frills hard drive that required some driver installation and I use as my main storage for my system. The second is my back up that I turn on once a week to back up my other drive and my desktop Windows settings. This drive comes with the very handy one touch backup startup and has the easy push to shut off technology. Now they have come out with even easier to use and no holds barred plug and play technology to meet the demands of customers who wanted to not be bothered with any setup other than to plug it in and let it run.
I really think Western Digital is a company that listens to its customers and uses what the customers want as their next line of technology. The customer has spoken more often about ease of use and having to not be bothered with loading drivers or other setup steps makes sense for today’s on the go face paced world of computers. The My Book series of external hard drives is just the next step in a good line of hard drives from Western Digital with the intention of making life easier for today’s computer consumer. For a no frills but extremely easy to set up and use external hard drive the My Book Essentials external hard drive is the way to go.
