Any experience with WD My Book Essential 2gb?

[sohaibrazzaq]

Lets just say my experience with WD has been extremely good. I was a seagate fan all along untill their HDD's starting to have problems back in early 2007 i guess and after that i only purchased WD hdd's, both external and internal. atm i have WD 1Tb caviar black, 1.5tb & 2tb caviar green internal and 3x My Book essential 1TB drives and neither 1 of them have given me any problems.

Being short on space again, i was thinking of getting 2x WD my book essential 2gb drives and i went to newegg and got scared with so many negative reviews on that model. Now i know its a matter of luck of getting a dud drive but when there are equal negative reviews to positive reviews then there is defintely something wrong with the drive so i wanted to ask here if someone is using that specific model or suggest some other 2tb external drive in the same price range.

Here's the drive i am talking about: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136748

It do have USB 3.0 support which is a plus but my current Asus x58 P6T mobo does'nt have a usb 3.0 port but i might get a pcie2.0 to usb3.0 expansion card if everything works fine.

And oh finally, how is seagate doing these days? Does their drives still have that firmware problem?
Suggestions please

[Vidd]

I prefer the Western Digital Elements line. A 2TB Elements averages $89 online, which is cheaper than the Essential. Elements has the same drive, but no fancy firmware features and no software.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136471

[sohaibrazzaq]

But it is only USB 2 unless i am mistaken , buying a 2tb elements means you are stuck with a 30 MB/s max transfer rate.

[jman98]

sohaibrazzaq - Great question. Here's my conclusion. When it comes to motherboards and hard drives, there is no consensus. What works for you may not work for me. What is 100% garbage for me may work great for you.

I ended up going with 2 Seagate ST320006 2 TB SATA drives on my PC build earlier in the year. I had some weird temporary disk freeze issues that I at first thought were Seagate problems but they actually ended up happening because I needed to update the firmware on my Crucial SSD boot drive. I have no specific Seagate issues to report on my build and I would buy them again. You didn't mention this, but I wanted to point out that earlier in the year people were reporting weird problems with all manufacturers of 3 TB drives and unless things have improved recently, I'd definitely avoid those no matter who makes them.