Western Digital My Book Home Edition 500 GB USB Hard Drive

Many of you may have heard mixed reviews of Western Digital products, via various threads on the web. After about two months of using this product, I've had very few problems with the drive itself. First, it's huge. And I mean huge. For me, 500 gigs was far more than I needed, which is why I bought it. I backed up my entire macbook hard drive, and it didn't even put a dent in the memory of this thing. Next, I have a PC at work, and the HD can connect with one and go right to the next with no problems at all. Finally, the firewire connection is awesome. I know for those of you who know what you're doing this is pretty obvious, but I can't get enough of it, since the HD is basically my macbook hard drive. One final, and minor, tidbit is the Truecrypt program that comes installed on the HD. You do need Windows to set it up, but it is pretty cool. If you're interested, check out what people have to say about this on the web.

However, this unit does have a few drawbacks. First, Memeo. Memeo is a program that automatically begins running on your computer when you hook the HD up, but it's a temporary program. After 30 days, you either have to buy it, or delete it. I recommend deleting it. It slows down your computer, runs at inopportune times (for example, always), and takes up memory on your computer that you probably don't have to spare, which is why you're buying the HD in the first place. Next, and hand in hand with Memeo, is the automatic backup plan. I don't know what this program is, or why you need it, because if you buy an external drive, chances are you already know what you want to back up, and have done so before the plan is even installed and takes effect. Next, this program is nearly impossible to delete. It took me three hours to get rid of all of the files from my macbook, and the last two files were by sheer dumb luck (hold the "apple" key while dranking the "weed" files to the trash-thanks apple support). Now it's not necessary to do this, I know, but the files do take up space, and in one instance I couldn't get the icon off of the desktop. Finally, there's HD's downloads. If you own a Scandisk Cruzer micro, it's the same thing as the U3 system; as far as I'm concerned, worthless. I'm not trying to start a battle with those of you who are fans, it's just that for me, personally, I don't need it, and I find it annoying, occasionally.

Sorry for the length of this review, but I have nothing better to do. Anyway, for you macbook users, you may want to delete the aforementioned programs very quickly, because I've even heard of Memeo and the other demon programs "crashing" peoples' powerbooks. I personally didn't experience this, but hey, better safe than sorry. I hope this was helpful, and this unit is portable (small and not very heavy), comes with all the necessary cords, and the blue indicator light is not too bright to be annnoying, it has a power button, blah blah blah. I'm rating it as good because I wasted a lot of time deleting unneccesary programs, some of which are still on my work PC.