WD 500GB MY BOOK Problems?

[whileheavenwept]

Hey guys,

I'm new to these boards and had a question for ya. I'm looking to buy a new external hdd for cheap and wanted to know your opinion. I came across the Western Digital 500gig My Book Premium Firewire hard drive and wanted to know if any of you had any problems with it in the past. Has it ever given you guys errors or anything? Also, I deal a lot with mixing music and therefor need a pretty quiet environment, how much noise to these bad boys make?

Can you guys recommend any external drives to get?
I need it to be able to run on both Mac OS X and Windows XP sp2. It needs to be Firewire, and at least 500 gigs. Oh it also has to be cheap, im looking in the 200-300 price range.
Cheers guys.

 

[hennessy1]

No they arent bad at all I have one works wonderful. But may I suggest to buy a seperate oem hdd and also a seperate enclosure. This would let you have the most space for the cheapest price.

 

[whileheavenwept]

Woah, thats so cool. I didn't even know you could do that. Thanks for the tip hennessy1.

Just a question though. I was researching some enclosures and regular oem hdd's and came across these,
hdd
Seagate 500gb
enclosure
Mini Firewire Enclosure

I don't have a lot of knowledge with this sort of thing, so my question is, will these be compatible with each other?
Also, how safe is this in terms of not running into any errors or problems down the line such as the hard drive crashing and erasing my files? Would it be better to go for the WD My Book 500gig in this case?

Thanks again,
Cheers.

 

[hennessy1]

Yeah those will work fine with each other. No there wont be and data corruption. Works basically like anything other removeable media dont disconnect it from the computer until your complete sure its done writing to it. Also I say this because I use alot of external drives for my dvd video files and trust me I wouldnt ever forgive myself if I lost those so yes they are in my opinion reliable.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

I've seen the 500gb firewire editions of the Seagate FreeAgent (the "Pro" ones) & Western Digital MyBook (Premium as you stated) on sale as low as the mid $100s. The hot deals forum here is useful, as are slickdeals.net & fatwallet.com.

 

[Narmer]

make sure you get an enclosure that has a fan. And don't concentrate too much on the price for the enclosure considering it'll be holding the hard drive that holds your documents. When these hard drives overheat, you may be able to get it replaced under warranty but you won't get your files back.

EDIT: Put the external drive where there is a lot of spece/air circulation.