Top positive review
My Super Vault
By Organic Taco on Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2012
The packaging and this product looks amazing. The speeds for 2.0 are good (I have no complaints, but if you want super fast speeds look for USB 3.0 drives). I don't have anything bad to say about this product, so this review isn't too helpful. I will say though that it has never stalled on me, it has always worked, and there are no glitches. It is reliable and dependable and that is what I want and need. If you want other things, you should look around and compare different models and brands. Look for what problems people report and go from there. I've had no problems for the past 2 years and I use this external at least once a week, so I got more than my money's worth. Heck I've still got like 600 GB left and I wouldn't mind buying a larger capacity model of My Book Elite right now. I am looking forward to the 4 and 8 TB drives.I hope this model and the same dependability continues into the future.
Top critical review
40 people found this helpful
Nice package, but unacceptably bad performance
By Michael F. on Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2010
Let me say first that I've been in IT for 25 years. Western Digital is the only brand of hard drive I've ever bought, and have never had one fail or have any problem of any kind; I'll continue to buy their bare hard drives until they give me a reason to change. However - the software (SmartWare) that comes with this drive is just plain JUNK. I've had this for one day and updated the device firmware and SmartWare to the latest versions with no improvement. Here are my problems: 1. It's unacceptably inflexible with regards to configuration in terms of controlling what gets backed up, what doesn't, etc. It's view to your data isn't by folder, it's by file type. So for example, you don't back up everything in My Documents; you back up all of your "Music." I want more precise control than that. 2. Performance is horrible. To be fair, this was running on an 8-year old Dell Dimension 8200. But - it's still a 2.0GHz Pentium with maxed-out memory running XP Pro, with USB 2.0 ports and current 7200 RPM drives with at least 8MB cache. Every other application on the machine still runs extremely well (hence the reason the machine continues to serve as our primary desktop). With SmartWare, I expected an initial period of a few hours of intense processing to get the baseline backup done, and then only brief bursts of activity as files get added and changed. What actually happened was the initial backup took around 12 hours (with CPU utilization at or near 100% on that one process), and then when it reported the backup was complete, SmartWare continued to consume around 50% of the CPU. At that point, launching Firefox, which normally takes a few seconds, took about 30 seconds to come up. Forget playing even a modest game. To make matters worse, each time a user logs back on to the machine, SmartWare starts all over with its "analysis" of how much "music," "movies," "documents," etc., are on the system - so it's as if it starts over with each user log on. I've already started the process to return this. It will be replaced by something I already know works: an Acomdata Samba enclosure, a Western Digital black SATA drive, and SyncBack Pro software. Sorry, WD, after many years of complete satisfaction, you dropped the ball on this one.
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