Reviews Home > Computers > Drives & Storage > Hard Drives

Top Rated Product

This product is no longer available. Continue shopping at Best Buy .

Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Model number: WDH1U10000N | SKU: 8475777

Stack this external hard drive next to your PC for 1TB of additional storage space for your digital photos, music, movies and more. Take a product tour.

Average Customer Rating:

4.0 out of 5 (95 Reviews)

75 of 95 (79%) customers would recommend this product to a friend.

Customer Reviews for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

5.0 5

western Digital 1TB external hard drive 11/19/2009
By Dinah23 from North Highlands, CA

Value for Price

4.0 5

Ease of Use

4.0 5

Performance

4.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: able to store what I wanted
What's not so great: nothing

"The product is what I was looking for to download my graphic files and I'm gald I bought it."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

Share this Review:

Review 2 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

4.0 5

Good if you have high storage needs 11/17/2009
By Primalclaws1974 from Grinnell, Iowa

Value for Price

5.0 5

Ease of Use

5.0 5

Performance

4.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: Good amount of storage
What's not so great: Has crashed a few times in the last 3 months I've had it

"I have 2 of these, one is smaller, and had it a year, they are decent priced externals, and don't look too bad. I have had a few problems with crashes, but haven't lost any data. I am planning on buying another, hopefully a 1.5 tb this time, since they are getting so cheap!"

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

Share this Review:

Review 3 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

5.0 5

glad I bought it 11/16/2009
By jimpap3 from central jersey

What's great about it: easy to use
What's not so great: I haven't found out yet

"I love it. Very easyto use. I dropped it and it still works. I backed up 8 years of stuff (pics, docs) in a couple hours. I have a very old computer, a newer cheap computer and a laptop; I am glad to have everything on an external drive becasue; 1. the very olcomputer could crash. 2. cheap computerdoesn't have much memory and 3. laptop, 8 years of stuff can be viewd anywhere."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

Share this Review:

Review 4 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

5.0 5

Awesome price and amazing HD 11/15/2009
By djmm from Kankakee, IL

Value for Price

5.0 5

Ease of Use

5.0 5

Performance

5.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: Easy to use, just plug in and use and the price was regularly $350 and I got it for roughly $90
What's not so great: dust might get into the groves and have to be cleaned at somepoint in the way future but that is manageable

"The HD holds everything of mine from movies to music to homework and pictures. I love this and recommend it to anyone who wants to save things for life. I have over 160 full length movies and the HD hasn't even budged. I get the movies from online websites and download them for a monthly fee. It is much cheaper than purchasing them and having a million DVDs."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

Share this Review:

Review 5 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

5.0 5

Good For the Price 11/15/2009
By iseepinkelefants from Texas

Value for Price

5.0 5

Ease of Use

5.0 5

Performance

4.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: Easy to Install, Price, Warranty
What's not so great: Scratches Easily, Harddrives need more protection

"I bought this in April (2009) and I had to return it a few weeks ago (10/09) because it stopped working, but it was entirely my fault. It accidentially fell a few times (I know big no no) and this last time must have done it in. It sucks that I lost all 900GB of music and videos but I went online and WD offered to send me a new one once they recieved my old one. The only cost I had to pay was shipping ($13 with insurance and track and confirm). So I guess at least it's not a total loss. In fact I'm on here to get another one in the meantime.

Now onto the review, the drive works great. All you do is plug it in, it self installs and is ready to use in less than 5 minutes. It's pretty quick and really it's a no brainer to use.

The only gripe I have with it is it needs better protection. Now I dropped it numerous time, not from very high up, maybe 6-12 inches, but in general the case is plastic and inside the drive doesn't have a lot of protection. I've only every used WD so I don't know about other drives but hard drive manufactors could use with maybe enclosing the thing in rubber and then putting a plastic case over it because let's face it these things are sensitive and you're gonna drop it. You'll try not to but it will happen.

The only other problem I had was again with the case. I have mine in black and being plastic it scartches easily. The black does a pretty good job at covering it up but I notice them.

Other than that you'll love the drive. You could do with having a backup of the backup but if it fails WD gives you 2 years warranty and they'll give you a new one. In my book that's not such a bad thing."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

Share this Review:

Review 6 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

5.0 5

Good Product 11/14/2009
By Dfyeant from Everywhere, US

Value for Price

5.0 5

Ease of Use

5.0 5

Performance

5.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: lots of storage space easy to transfer files too
What's not so great: nothing so far

"Good product for storing your files, easy to transfer data"

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

Share this Review:

Review 7 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

5.0 5

The best choice 11/10/2009
By Robavi from FL

Value for Price

5.0 5

Ease of Use

5.0 5

Performance

5.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: Easy to use,and ellegant

"The best choice for storage the files.
Easy to use and ellegant."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

Share this Review:

Review 8 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

5.0 5

Very nice 11/05/2009
By Mug from Seattle, WA

Value for Price

4.0 5

Ease of Use

5.0 5

Performance

5.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: Easy to set up and simple. The greatest part is compatible with windows & Mac Os

"I have been using WD, Simpletech & Seagate EHDs since 07 and I would prefer WD as it does a very good job on Windows & Mac Os machines. Seagate is too expensive compare to WD and Simpletech is not as fast as WD when transferring files. Besides, WD is easy to set up and simple. Easy to carry and nice outlook. I would definitely recommend it to everyone who I know."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

Share this Review:

Review 9 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

5.0 5

People don't know what they're talking about 10/31/2009
By Romer from Tulsa, OK

Value for Price

5.0 5

Ease of Use

4.0 5

Performance

4.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: Fast read/write, great price, reliable
What's not so great: Exterior smudges easily

"I'm really surprised that people are buying this and not knowing how to use it, then giving it a bad review. I've had mine for almost a year now and I haven't had a single problem with it. I've taken it with me all over the place and I haven't had any reliability issues with it.

As for the people that are upset that it's FAT32, it's easy to go into windows and format it as NTFS.. no software needed. And as for speed? Maybe you should hook it up to a USB 2.0 connection, or upgrade your computer. I hit 63MB/sec with this which is more than fast enough to move items around. Doing a backup of your PC is memory and CPU intensive, don't blame it on this drive. As for the person that was "disappointed" that a TB is "only 1000GB"... really? Do we not know what a TB is? You might want to check your other drives too, none of them will show in your computer the size that is written on the drive."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

Share this Review:

Review 10 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

1.0 5

Junk, trash and worthless 10/27/2009
By EC34 from Maryland

Value for Price

1.0 5

Ease of Use

1.0 5

Performance

1.0 5

Ease of Installation

2.0 5

What's great about it: nothing
What's not so great: everything

"We purchased 4 of these to back up data for a major project. Within 6 months 3 of them crashed. We had to send them out to a data recovery company that was able to recover about 75% of the irreplacable and very expensive data at $5,000 per drive. Customer service was no help whatsoever. Avoid these drives at all cost"

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: No

Share this Review:

Review 11 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

1.0 5

DEAD ON ARRIVAL 10/21/2009
By Livy48 from Wellsville, KS

Value for Price

1.0 5

Ease of Use

1.0 5

Performance

1.0 5

Ease of Installation

1.0 5

What's great about it: NOTHING
What's not so great: IT DOES NOT WORK AT ALL!

"Plugged in per directions and tried every support suggestion available and the drive will not run or do anything. It DOES have power to it but is DEAD. Been waiting for a day or more for a reply from WDC's e-mail support. Highly skeptical of the outcome."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: No

Share this Review:

Review 12 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

1.0 5

HORRIBLE product! 10/11/2009
By WesternDigitalSTINKS

Value for Price

1.0 5

Ease of Use

1.0 5

Performance

1.0 5

Ease of Installation

1.0 5

What's great about it: Nothing good about this device!
What's not so great: It doesn't let you choose specific files to back up. It took over 12 HOURS to back up 150 GB! Couldn't retrieve files!

"I wasted a hundred bucks on this junk.

I left it running all night as it backed up all my pictures. I only wanted it to back up the photos in a specific folder, but that wasn't an option that it allowed. After waiting an incredibly long time for it to finish, I tested whether-or-not it worked by trying to retrieve some images from it. After several attempts, it kept failing because "the meta data was not converted." Who cares about the meta data? What about the pictures?

I wouldn't recommend this drive to anyone! It's inexpensive, yes, but it's also CHEAP, and it doesn't work!"

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: No

0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Share this Review:

Review 13 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

2.0 5

Nice hard drive, yet highly unreliable 10/05/2009
By Artanis186 from Jersey Shore, PA

Value for Price

2.0 5

Ease of Use

4.0 5

Performance

3.0 5

Ease of Installation

4.0 5

What's great about it: Nice storage amount, decent speed transfers
What's not so great: Unreliable, loose wire ports

"In my experiences as a gamer, I can tell you I do know quite a bit about computers. Though not exactly the Einstein of the computer world, I can safely say I know plenty more than most people in normal society. Now, this drive looked really promising. I read it has 1TB. Then later I find it only has 1000GB. Not a big deal, then it's real amount it ~930GB. Sure, I can live with it. It works well, it has alright transfer speeds.

Now the problem... the drive is very unreliable. If you unplug it shortly after a transfer. You will likely lose any files you just recently transferred and modified in it. Worse off, if you unplug it while transferring. Say goodbye to all your work. And to really help in the aggravation, they seem to have made the ports so that the wires stay connected, but they're incredibly loose. I have gone through 2 of these drives and am considering switching to a different product."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: No

0 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Share this Review:

Review 14 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

5.0 5

this product is great 10/01/2009
By Razzz from tally

Value for Price

5.0 5

Ease of Use

5.0 5

Performance

5.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: works wonderfully

"Most of the people complaining about this hard drive are your usual noobs who probably don't even know how to format their drive properly. Obviously a tb hard drive is not going to be exactly 1000 gigs. It will be more likely 930 gigs. And for those that are even getting less....you probably installed their software which makes your 1tb hardrive more near 800 gigs.....It's all about knowing what you're doing. This drive works wonderfully and has never caused a problem for me."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Share this Review:

Review 15 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

5.0 5

One Great External 09/28/2009
By Meshuggahener1 from Pottsboro, TX

Value for Price

5.0 5

Ease of Use

4.0 5

Performance

4.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: Space, Simple setup
What's not so great: FAT32 and frequent reboot

"This External serves great to any business or home that needs a lot of memory. Many people won't need to convert to NTFS if they make a backup on their internal HD and compress it via WinRAR and split the archive to whatever they think it should be (i.e. 200,000,000 bytes = about 180 Mb per file, give or take). Once the files(limit to 99 split files) are compressed and split, sending(cut/copy and paste) it over to a FAT32 system is completely possible. I have used this for backing up movie images(.iso, .img, .daa, etc.), which are usually too big for a FAT32, but when archived, this issue is resolved. I am not to sure about making a backup file of windows on the same drive to send to the external, never tried it. The internal HD should be partitioned off and locked as a recovery precaution, which is easily done with Acronis Disk Director Suite. All in all this will serve a lot of people's needs for more space on whatever their needs call for.

One drawback to this product is it likes to idle and sometimes becomes inaccessible. There is a simple solution. Leave the AC power plugged in and simply remove the USB cable and the FireWire cable until windows doesn't recognize it; then reboot the HD by inserting the USB cable 1st followed by the FireWire cable 2nd. and that should fix most booting problems with this External HD."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Share this Review:

Review 16 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

1.0 5

Another rip off - Not as advertised 09/27/2009
By Marv65 from Williamsburg, VA

Value for Price

1.0 5

Ease of Use

5.0 5

Performance

1.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: easy to use
What's not so great: holds far less than 1 TB

"Simply disappointed with Western Digital. This external drive holds far less than 1TB. Tried to contact WD; no response or help from tech support. Sure will be my last hard drive from them. This unit is just a rip off sorry to report."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: No

0 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Share this Review:

Review 17 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

4.0 5

Good Hard Drive for school 09/21/2009
By Anonymous from Grand Rapids, MI

Value for Price

5.0 5

Ease of Use

5.0 5

Performance

4.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: good for storage

"I bought this for school for the storage and It works great. The only thing I would like to know is that if I can use the USB cord only or do I have to use the AC Adapter too?"

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

Share this Review:

Review 18 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

1.0 5

Wasted Money 09/14/2009
By rescue16emt

Value for Price

1.0 5

Ease of Use

4.0 5

Performance

1.0 5

Ease of Installation

4.0 5

What's great about it: Price for storage
What's not so great: Crash after crash, can't recover any data

"Great price for the amount of storage but if it don't work as advertised even $1.00 would be too much. WD, this has got to be the worse product in your line. Tech support (ha). Another waste. I'm sorry I purchased this drive and advise all the are looking for cheap storage, look somewhere else. (maybe Seagate) DO NOT BUY THIS DRIVE!"

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: No

0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Share this Review:

Review 19 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

2.0 5

frustrating 09/09/2009
By kaleto from san diego

Value for Price

4.0 5

Ease of Use

2.0 5

Performance

3.0 5

Ease of Installation

2.0 5

What's great about it: inexpensive for 1Tb
What's not so great: no backup software, formatted FAT32, no Firewire

"This stupid drive comes out of the box formatted FAT32 instead of NTFS. That means you can't use Windows Backup to back up your hard drive files to it as the biggest file supported by FAT32 is 4Gb and Windows Backup creates one humongous file.

Before you can reformat it to NTFS you need to make sure you've downloaded the My Book utility from their support website so you can reinstall the software. But before you can do that, you need to register the product.

Now after all that hassle you can finally back up your computer! Oh, wait--it doesn't come with any back up software. And it only has a USB connector, no Firewire.

This was a pain to deal with. I should have stuck with Seagate."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: No

Share this Review:

Review 20 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Rating

4.0 5

Nice drive but it's a slooooow drive 09/09/2009
By Mke20000 from Largo, FL

Value for Price

5.0 5

Ease of Use

5.0 5

Performance

1.0 5

Ease of Installation

5.0 5

What's great about it: A lot of storage, quiet, nice looking case
What's not so great: Speed, or rather lack of.

"WD makes some pretty bulletproof drives, much better than Seagate which I wouldn't trust with a text file of my shopping list let alone any important files.

This drive is nice looking, quiet and has a ton of space.

That being said, the elephant in the room is the drive's speed, this thing is slooooow. A modest 360GB backup took literally 3 days. Yeah, that bad. The drive inside is one of their GreenPower drives that only spin at 5400RPM, that's why they're quiet.

Still, I've had Seagate external drives which were faster but in the end, reliability is what it's all about and WD has it."

Would you recommend this product to a friend?: Yes

Share this Review:

1-20 of 95

More Reviews for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Customer Reviews for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 1 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 2 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 3 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 4 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 5 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 6 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 7 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 8 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 9 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 10 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 11 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 12 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 13 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 14 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 15 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 16 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 17 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 18 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 19 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive

Review 20 for Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive