Great for online backup to disk (See our 'Backup Hints')

This is a very affordable and capable drive made better by Western Digital's (WD) decision to dial-back the previously aggressive software that installed using two (2) lettered drives rather than one. We like the form factor, 2-TB size, and ease of use which has led us to standardize on this drive with clients for backup to disk. So we've acquired over a dozen of them and have had a couple fail in warranty, but WD replaced them with few problems.

BACKUP HINTS: We always try to implement backup with multiple drives to accommodate inevitable failures and we've found the free 'Cobian' backup to be a great tool to make it all work. We typically direct daily backups to 2 or 3 alternating drives and let Cobian advise us of success or failure in a daily E-mail.

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Super fast with USB 3.0, but the software impedes the ease of use

I bought this drive to serve as backup for two computers, and for the use of USB 3.0. To my surprise, the drive is actually kinda slow. I'm not sure what the spindle speed is, but I would guess it's probably only 5400rpm. However, that is not to say its always slow. For some reason, Western Digital seems to have designed this drive only to be used with USB 3.0. The 2.0 speeds float around 10MB/sec (despite the fact that 2.0 can handle up to 50MB/sec). That said, I've been able to get around 100MB/sec and a max of 320MB/sec with 3.0, thus my belief that WD intended consumers to use 3.0 with this drive. In addition, I would not recommend this drive to someone who truly wants to use it as a "portable" drive (ie plug n play between lots of computers) due to the fact that for the drive to run at full-speed you must load a special driver onto every machine. The annoyance comes from the fact that you must reload/reinstall this driver every time. Furthermore, if you run the included WD Backup Software, you must then use that software to eject the drive before you can unplug. Another slight annoyance is the existence of a seemingly non-functional power button on the back. I've never had to use it, and when I've tried, it seems not to do anything. Perhaps mine is faulty, or perhaps WD had some inane purpose for this button, but decided to leave it as a vestigial feature.

The worse hard drive I have ever seen.

Actually, I already had one. Second one I bought only because heads on my old one stopped working. I bought second one to use its parts to recovery information from my first hard drive.
First one, exactly same hard drive, died after 3 month. I bought it in Target, and I know that they still have many hard drives like that in stores. Although I recovered very important information from my hard drive, I lost the rest of it (almost 250gb).
I read many negative review after that, and I found that many people around the world had problems with this type of hard drives (WD Caviar Green).
DO NOT USE THIS HARD DRIVE FOR BACKUP FILES!
If your one still work, it could die really soon... =(

Good product A++++++, WD are the best!!

I got good reference about this hhd, i feel ok, too fast and no power interuption problems. Drivers are ok windows xp, 7 and linux. With a great backup software.... A++++++ Really recomend!!!

2 TB Hard Drive is the way to go!

This HD has so much space! I love the fact I will probably never need another external HD. It's has the USB 3.0 as well so everything transfers really fast onto the HD if yours laptop/pc/etc has USB 3.0 technology.