Seeing as my Freecom DataTank conked out at the beginning of the year (I’m still waiting to acquire either an allen key or a hacksaw so I can crack open the enclosure and rescue the drives within), I bought a new hard drive last week. It’s a Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB, and was on special offer from Amazon (£55 – a bargain).
Hard drives do pretty much what they say on the tin, so there’s not much to say about it. It does its job very well. It’s quiet, small, and rather easy on the eye. In fact, as a measure of how small it is, here it is next to the Universal Size Comparator:
That little lozenge down the front is the access light, and I think it’s the only immediately-noticeable flaw. When the drive is on, it glows blue. When the drive is in sleep mode (which it automatically goes in to when the host computer sleeps, turns off, or when the drive has a long period of inactivity), it flashes once every five seconds. However, when the drive’s being accessed, it flashes the top and bottom segments on and off, like on a zebra crossing. Mine is on a shelf under the desk, so it’s not too much of an issue, but if you had it on your desk, I couldn’t help but imagine that it would be somewhat distracting.
Aside from that, there’s not much else to say. It uses passive cooling through the Morse Code-shaped holes on the top, back and underside, so it’s very quiet – the only time the noise is noticeable is when the drive is spinning up from sleep mode.
There are a few inconveniences: for example, the ridiculous power adapter. I’m not complaining that you have to plug in the UK-style plug yourself (in fact, that task is trivial) but it uses one of those stupid, wretched plugs that end up obscuring two sockets on an extension board that has more than one row. Why is it so difficult to design an alternate power adapter?
Also, I’ve had trouble trying to register it for service, due to the fact WD thinks it’s an internal drive based on the serial number. Of course, external hard drives are very reliable, provided they’re well looked after and are replaced after a year or two. (In fact, storage is so cheap there’s no excuse not to buy multiple external hard drives).
So… anyway. That’s the My Book Essential. It’s not particularly exciting, but it does the job. As a hard drive should.