Western Digital Elements 500GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive

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Product Features:

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Customer Reviews:

• 
  2008-10-21
  By Lewis Ross Gray,
  Runs straight out of the box no problems with windows xp. I'snt really 160 Binary gigabytes it's 160 Decimal Gigabytes.
  
  This is a bit of a marketing rubbish it means that your computer will detect it as 149.05 Gigabytes. which is still pretty awesome for the price.
  
  
• 
  2008-10-24
  By Sacha,
  Just plugged it in, you don't have to do ANYTHING. Straight away an icon pops up and literally 10 seconds later you can just be pulling files across.
  
  I bought it because I was completely wiping my comp (had a particularly nasty virus) and starting again. Copied my entire music collection onto it in one go (20 odd gig), as well as loads of video files and other general stuff. Nothing went wrong, it all copied, wiped comp, rebooted, dragged everything back across, done. Conclusion: happy, fast, virus-free comp on which I now write. Simple.
  
  Only thing I could possibly criticise it on would be the time it takes for large quantities of information to move onto it (not so much off it). The 20 gig of music took a long time (like 2-3 hours), but then I know that's a huge amount of info, and it's only a USB powered drive, so fair enough. You only have to do it once. But if you were going to do a lot of shifting stuff back and forth with your drive (like 8+ gig), then I'd maybe get a bigger, powered drive.
  
  Now it's just sitting there as a useful backup system, and for absorbing files I don't often use, so don't need on the comp. Just generally useful to have around. Stupidly huge amount of space for me. You'd have to have a lot of video to use the space really. But hey, I'm future-proofed.
  
  Peace and Love xx
  
  
• 
  2008-10-28
  By Xer, UK
  Only used it for the first time yesterday and it has done a few odd things. It appears to have crashed while transferring data a couple of times. It seems to have also removed some of the icons from my ibook g4, though the data is still there and not that difficult to put them back.
  
  On the positive side, it is small and light and has certainly transferred the data from my mac which was one of my concerns. I haven't needed any extra cables for this.
  
  I wanted to get one that definitely worked with my mac and the price was a factor as well so given this, not a bad buy, though if I had a pc and a bigger budget, I prob wouldn't choose again.
  
  I am a little concerned given some of the initial hitches and other people's reviews that it may not last that long, but fingers crossed.
  
  
• 
  2008-11-09
  By Welshlion,
  Bought this device just over 6 months ago and it worked brilliantly, data transferred quickily and easily and then one day I booted up my pc and discovered this drive was not showing, went through all the logical procedures, checked the cables were properly connected and checked the fuse... I even tried connecting it to a different computer but still nothing!
  Fortunately Western Digital accepted that it was still under warranty and have agreed to check it and if necessary replace it, but with a warning that if they do replace it they will not recover any data.
  They do however recommend a few companies for data recovery and I sent the drive to one of them, they reported that the drive had suffered extreme electrical damage, presumably due to the fact that the only way to power down this drive is to disconnect it from the mains, but the data was recoverable for minimum cost that was roughly 5 times the cost of the drive.
  I have now sent the drive back to Western Digital for a replacement under the terms of the warranty and I guess that i'll just have to pray that the replacement performs better, not holding my breath though!
  
  
• 
  2008-12-01
  By C. Jones, UK
  I found WDE 500GB easy to setup and use. the transfer time was not a problem, although I did only transfer up to 80gb of video and photo's in one go. It has rubber shrouds either end to protect it from being damaged and didn't get hot whilst in use!