Price: $189.99 - $179.99
(as of Nov 20, 2024 21:00:15 UTC - Details)

Put your digital life on the sleek, high capacity My Book® Essential™ external hard drive. With WD quality and USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 connectivity, this drive is designed for today with tomorrow in mind. WD quality inside and out - My Book External drives are the world's best selling drives. There's a reason. We've been making hard drives for 20 years and we know how to protect your data. USB 3.0 plus USB 2.0 - A single drive with universal compatibility today and next-generation speed for tomorrow. Use it with USB 2.0 now and step up to USB 3.0 speed when you’re ready.
Up to 4 TB capacity
Dual USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 compatibility
Automatic, continuous backup or file backup option
Password protection and hardware encryption
2-year limited warranty
Reviewer: tony ng
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A ++ drive
Review: When it comes hard drive, what I usually look for is the size and whether it retains heat while exchanging files. This is a great drive from WD. I like WD since many years ago and it continue to produce great hardware. The drive itself is a 2tb drive and it is very fast. I can't believe that usb 3.0 is so much better than 2.0 usb.this drive comes in a sleak black color, shinny it is. has vents on sides that help to keep the drive cool. I bought this drive mainly to get it to store files and play on my playstation. Since playstation has a limit on 2tb, this is great. Formatting to Fat32 is a breezed. It came with a formatter as well. So for those that needed to format, you have everything in the drive, although you need to copy that formatter.exe file to your computer before you format.as for the durability, i say it's great. I like for that fact that it feels solid and strong. When you hold it, you feel like it is made from a well made strong and quality material. Some drives you buy cheap will not have this feels. One thing I don't like about the drive is that not about it's performance but rather maybe the black shinny outside shell tends to collect dust or maybe it's black and it is easier for me to see. I clean it and later I see dust on it again. Although it does not affect the drive performance but it does look dirty if look at it close up.overall the price is decent. it isn't cheap or expensive for a 2tb drive. however, because of the brand I think you get it for a very good drive for backup.

Reviewer: Reno Dad
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Great drives - I have 3 for media storage.
Review: Been using these for a couple of years and love them. I just add a new one whenever I need space. There are a couple of issues that are not for the faint of heart, but are easy to correct with a bit of googling.A few tips for success:1. These are DESKTOP EXTERNAL drives and are not meant to be portable or routinely traveled with. Plug them in and leave them stationary, just like the name says. Get some small portable drives if you need to hand transfer data. I have 6 or 7 portables for that reason.2. Ensure they get good, clean air flow and space to breathe. The cases don't run especially hot, which I suspect means they are overly insulated and don't shed enough heat.3. Take some time to get to know and customize the software they ship with. It's not bad, and somewhat better than similar products I've used from Seagate and Buffalo. Customize it so it only backs up what you want, when you need it. You can even specify file types and set file versioning, which is very useful. Also be sure to do the software and firmware upgrades through the management software.4. Set the power management appropriately. If you hit the disks often, you don't want them to drop to sleep mode every 15 minutes. Match it to your workflow. I personally do all my backups to one drive and treat the others as giant write space for archives that aren't catastrophic if I lose them.5. You may discover an issue with Windows 7 not recognizing more than 2 of them concurrently. It will manifest as only two mapping drives and the third not being recognized. It's a quick fix, just google and follow the instructions.Great little drives and ample storage for the price.UPDATE 7/3/13: I just purchased my fourth drive and added it on with no problems. The software -which has been updated to a very nice new interface- recognized it and had it working immediately. The drive shipped with the latest firmware and is visually identical to previous models. Still a great drive and value for the money.

Reviewer: 57 chevy thunder
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Great External Drive, however
Review: I recently purchased from Amazon two of the new 2TB My Book Essential hard drives to expand and upgrade my external file storage, consisting largely of nearly ten years of digital photo files. I have used Western Digital external drives for several years, and have had absolutely no reliability or quality problems with them. One of these two new drives is my "fire safe" backup, and the other is the "on duty" storage for all of our "past years" digital photos. These new drives are very fast and quiet.I would have given these new drives a five star rating, except for two issues, which may be very important for other people to know about. I hope my review will save the readers many hours of frustration, which I went through.The first issue that you may experience is a well known problem (just do an internet search of the problem) which causes your computer to take about TEN TIMES longer than normal to boot up. This is due to a conflict with the BIOS used by some manufacturers. (Both of my computers have the same initials as "High Power") One is my one year old laptop, and the other is our two year old desktop, both with all current "updates" installed. There is some hope that you may be able to avoid this problem by making some changes to your BIOS setup, but such was not the case for me. Talking with technical support people from both Western Digital and computer manufacturers plus an "on-site" house call by a very experienced local/independent computer specialist confirmed this. So at present the ONLY way we can avoid this problem is to leave the new external drive disconnected until after the computer is all finished with its whole start up process. (I do this by having the power supply for this new hard drive plugged in to a separate switched power strip which I then turn on only after the computer has completed booting up.) -you can do the same thing using the USB cable, if you wish.The second issue is with the Smart Ware software that comes with these new My Book Essential drives. After many hours of working with it, and "trying to like it," I finally un-installed it. For many people who do not currently have any type of "real-time" backup implemented for their system, it may be just fine. But for me, I hated the lack of "visibility" and lack of easy accessibility of the specific backed up files. And for some people these new on line automatic file back-ups may work, but the "transfer rate" time factor for a large number of large files is not to my liking. For years I have used a very simple and inexpensive real-time automatic file backup program, which in my opinion is totally user-friendly and user adjustable. (the image that come to my mind is of a little hamster running in his wheel automatically backing up my selected file (and folders)) that I will continue with. (-BTW, they are a USA company (in the state of Utah) with excellent customer support.)So, I am happy using these new external hard drives as "generic" external storage.As usual, I purchased from Amazon, and their price and delivery was perfect!

Reviewer: KIMMI
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Ok hai vadeeya

Reviewer: Harmony K.
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I used my new drive with Windows XP SP3 and USB 2.0. I filled the entire 1.8 TB in about 30 hours. The drive worked fine. It made absolutely no noise, and it stayed at room temperature all this time. Even the power adapter was only a little warm.I haven't tested the USB 3.0 part yet. That will have to wait until my next PC in 2011. I could buy a PCI-E x1 card for about $40 to add USB 3.0 capability to my current PC, but I don't think I'll bother. If you're interested in such a thing, there's even a WD product that looks pretty much like this one but comes bundled with a card like that.

Reviewer: Skinhead
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Being using WD s for 5 years now, got 12 of them loaded up and nary a complaint..besides WD has an excellent service support system so no buying anything else for me!

Reviewer: abc123
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I bought this hard drive on sale a few months and seems to be working just fine. So far I haven't been able to test out its USB 3.0 speed but the USB 2.0 is plenty fast for my purposes. I would recommend this product to anyone looking for simple backup hard drive.

Reviewer: Chicoo
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: It's been 10 days since i got this, working very well with my Mac Pro (had to re format it for Mac as it comes NTFS formatted)... so far so good, no complaints.Delivery by amazon is very good and one of the reasons I prefer to shop with them, hopefully standards remain high in future