Western Digital My Book Premium Edition WDG1C5000 500 GB

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Simple setup, Quiet, Small size, large capacity
Disadvantages:	none

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

SUMMARY
The Western Digital (WD) My Book Premium 500GB is a small, well built external hard drive which is quiet in operation, with excellent capacity and choice of USB 2 or Firewire connectivity. As someone who is interested in technology, photography and video editing, I often end up running low on storage space on my PC. I had been looking to get another hard drive for some time and had seen the WD advertised in a magazine at a reasonable price. I bought mine from an online retailer and as of March 2006 have been using it for 3 months and I have not experienced any problems with it.

FEATURES
Well without wanting to make it sound as though it's not a good product, because I think it is, there's not much to it, it's just an external hard drive, however it is stylish and feels well built. It is quiet as there is noisy fan, but it doesn't overheat because of the air vents on the top surface. I have mine on my desk and when in standby or turned on but not in operation you wouldn't know it was there, but when it reads something I can feel a little vibration on the desk, for example when using my mouse. It's far from excessive though.

This range of discs comes in a variety of flavours which vary in their connectivity to the computer and the size of the disc, and therefore they will vary in price. The Premium version that I have differs from the standard version because it has Firewire connections as well as USB2 and the light on the front is blue not green.

IN THE BOX
You get the hard drive itself which is mat black with dimensions of about 6cm thick, 13.cm long by about 16.5cm tall. You also get a USB and Firewire lead, plus a power lead with an adapter for converting the power supply. There was an instruction sheet and software on CD as well.

CONNECTING
First of all I installed the WD software CD which installed the drivers, this was quick and painless although it also came with Google Picasso, which I promptly uninstalled because it affected software I had installed.

The next bit was simplicity at it's best. Now I am quite computer literate and have installed internal drives before but this is so much easier, literally plug in the USB port, plug in the power, press the button on the front and hey presto, it's installed, allocated a drive letter and straight away you can start to use it.

You have the option of firewire connection too, but personally I find USB 2 is fine.

USAGE
Turing the unit on is simply a case of pressing the large circular button on the front of the disc, the blue light will flash for a moment but startup times are incredibly quick, probably 30 seconds tops. You'll get a WD icon in the system tray as well. Windows automatically detects the drive, assigns the drive letter and gives the usual options of file viewing, playing or open folders.

I use my drive as a backup for my photos, video and music files. You could save anything you want to the disc, pretty much all except the operating system of your computer. The transfer of files is a case of drag and drop, in exactly the same way that you would in any other folder. I find the transfer very quick indeed, I transferred 43 GB in about 10 mins - 15 mins, although this is very approximate but preferable to backing up to CDs and DVDs.

I tend to do a lot of video editing, which by its nature creates large files. I have found this drive is perfect for backing up the completed videos and playback is also smooth and uninterrupted, but I would still use an internal SATA drive for my main editing and transfer to external source because the data transfer rates should be better.

The blue light on the front power button looks really cool, well I think so at least! When not in use it displays a solid blue line, constantly lit up, but when accessing a file this will flash. When not in use and you want to turn the drive off you have to press the circular button in and old it for about 3-5 seconds until the blue light flashes from side to side then it will power down.

This is my only criticism, sometimes I find it can be a bit fiddly or if you don't hold the button for the right time it won't power down. I know this might sound petty for 3-5 seconds but it might be better to have a separate off switch?

CONCLUSION
I don't think you could make this product any simpler in overall setup and use, other than my comment regarding the on off button. It's quick, looks good, and quiet and above all it does exactly what it should. I don't think you can really make hard discs sexy, but Western Digital has at least made it look classy. I would recommend this, especially to people that don't like fiddling about inside their computer.