The Matthias Chronicles

Thursday, July 10, 2008, 5:01 PM

Review: Western Digital 320 GB MyBook Essential 2.0 External Hard Drive (WDH1U3200N)

by Mar Matthias Darin

Buy Now

I own two of these little jewels, so heres my take on these drives.

I was skeptical at first because Western Digital has a nasty habit of making hard drives that are not Linux friendly. Since, I run a Linux server, obviously anything I purchase must support Linux.

I ordered two at once. One worked perfectly and the other one was really messed up. The LED light didn't even work right. Leave to the U.S. Postal Apes to out due the American Express Gorillas. You'd think with the highway robbery racketeering the U.S. Postal (lack of) Service extorts from us, they would at least deliver the merchandise undamaged. But No... that would be too much to expect, after all, Heaven forbid they might actually do some work. But thats a different rant...

Back to the MyBook. I sent the damaged one back and got the replacement in lightening speed. I plugged them in and Voila! Linux recognized them through the USB storage driver without any trouble at all.

Using cfdisk, I partitioned then to ext3 them proceeded to format them. One important note here is that the drives need to have the power removed for 10 seconds before formating. Its weird, but if you don't, the drives will not work properly. I spent 4 hours on this one. Trust me here, its very frustrating to have to format a drive 4 times thinking there's a problem when there isn't.

I chose to format them as one partition each so formatting (plus the badblocks scan) took what seemed forever. Well worth the wait though.

After formating was complete, I began to populate the drives with all my system data. I use the drive as part of my backup system. They work absolutely perfect. I have had USB drives that freak out if you leave them connected too long, but the WD MyBook drives don't have this problem.

They have been running absolutely fabulously since I brought them online (plugged them into my server). These are a definite buy again item. I am impressed at how well Western Digital built them. They are sleek and lightweight (see image above).

With these drives, there is no excuse for not doing a backup. So what are you waiting for? If you haven't got a WD MyBook, you definitely need to look them over. They are well worth it and the price is unbelievably low.