Western Digital Elements 640GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive - WDE1U6400N

Bought this a year ago and it's still working, I actually just bought the 1.5 tb version for my video files. The shell is metal and feels very solid. The only slight complaint that I have is that the ports on the back feel a little loose when you plug them in, but I've never had any problems with it.
 
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The drive was very easy to connect and started working flawlessly. The drive appears solidly built and looks good on the silver PC. I have been using it to backup my critical data and use it a primary storage for the large video files, freeing up significant and needed hard drive space. It is an excellent buy at a great price.
 
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It stores stuff. Seems to work alright. I had some write errors when copying 60-70 gigs of data to it but those problems have seemed to go away which is fairly strange. Other than that it has worked flawlessly. Only storing about 100 gig on it so far just to transport around. Not as small as those pocket portable HD's but smaller than the other Western Digital MyBooks or whatever they're called. Good value for the space though. Most other external HDs selling at this price point (or at least when I purchased it) are only 500 gig drives.
 
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Doesn't get any easier than this. Plug in the power cord, attach to the computer, and it is ready for whatever you need. Unit is solid, and it looks like it could take a lot of abuse.
 
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This is pristine value. Easy to use, power plug, USB adapter! Wonderful spacious and compact. Love it!
 
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This is an excellent buy if you need tons of space to store your pictures/music. Easy setup and use.
 
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Ordered external HD on Tuesday - arrived on Friday, less than $6 shipping. Plugged it in, turned on PC and there it was. Began moving files but one minor glitch later arose. WD factory sets the HD for FAT32 files, which XP doesn't use. Found Microsoft article kb307881 on how to convert FAT32 to NTFS files. WD factory setting names the HD "Elements" and you will need that info for conversion. Had 100 GB of data on HD but it took only 7 or 8 minutes to convert. During conversion it looks like nothing is happening but it is. In 1988 I paid $400 for a 40 MB HD. In 2008 I paid $80 for a 640 GB HD. Buy.com should be everyone's first stop for electronics and computer gear!
 
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After searching for an external hard drive, this was the most memory I could find for the price. I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get started. You virtually just plug into a USB port and it does everything for you. I use it to keep all of my pictures, video and music, freeing up the hard drive on my computer. Excellent product!
 
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but the quick setup guide was not in the box.
 
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Plug it in and dumped an image of my entire system on it. Compact. Does its thing. I highly recommend this product.
 
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This is a good buy, thank you Buy.com and it came on time and it works as expected.
 
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Data transfer is so slow. But it's sleek and pretty.
 
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LIke all hard drives I have had good ones and bad ones. For the price and being a WD drive with 640gb, I bought it and hooked it up to my Dish Network receiver. Works great.
 
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Very pleased with my order, pleased with the price. It was a smart buy
 
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This plug and play storage drive works fine. But takes a very long time to come on after it is plugged in. This may be due to my system using USB 1.0 instead of 2.o. Otherwise fine.
 
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So far so good. Solid feeling unit that is good for backup, especially at $80! No problems so far. Wish they were advertised at their actual storage space, but oh well. It was a bargain, can't complain.
 
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I've had this HDD for about week now and throughout this week I have assessed a lot. First of all for the price it was a great deal: $80 for a 640gb Ext. HDD. Cheapest on the net. Although the storage capacity cannot get better for the price, the transfer speed of the HDD just barely gets by. If you bought it for just the capacity for storing movies or music on it, its definetly a buy. But if you can't stand the speeds, then I do not recommend this product.
 
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I purchased 3 of these units for music storage. The synced right up with my computer and I experienced no issues transfering all of my music files. I've only been using the units for about a month but found no complaints thus far.
 
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Last year I bought the 320gb version of this for the same price. That model ran hot, though it never actually burned out. This one with twice the capacity runs nice and cool. Sure it's a little slow since it's USB, but all I do with it is archiving so I don't care. This is 2008. The first thing you should do when you receive this (if using XP or Vista) is to format it in NTFS (right click / format). It only takes a few seconds and then you can actually store Windows Backup files on it. I also suggest naming it so it's easier to spot in your disk drive listing (which these days might also include flash cards and who-knows-what). Just right click / rename. I called mine 'Elements640'.
 
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I bought this drive because my current WD my book is full. I have been in the market for a while now and finally found this great deal. I hope to help out by giving some info about the product that I could not find elsewhere. This is not as popular a product line as the passport and my book lines, also from WD, but is excellent none the less. Also, I found the drive here on Buy.com for 79.99 with free shipping. I found a 5% off coupon as well, bringing the price to under 12 cents per gig, which is amazing really. The next best thing I could find was about 13 cents and 14 cents per gig, so quite the deal. Now to some of my questions. This drive comes pre-formatted to FAT32. That is normal, and can be formatted to NTFS also. For me, FAT is alright because I plan on hooking this guy up to my xbox 360 and the xbox does not recognize NTFS unfortunately. It also seems as though the drive has gone through a few revisions, which makes sense as technology grows. It is a nice silver color, very sturdy. The logo is the standard WD logo, not the weird 'e' pictured above. This drive does not have an on/off switch. Apparently some revisions do. I have seen pictures. Not mine. Also, there have been 2 different AC adapter types out there. One is a 2 part cord with an external brick, the other just a single cord with no brick. Mine had no brick. I like this for a few reasons. 1, less bulk and cords and all. 2. The brick type adapter also had a funny end that plugged into the drive. It looked kinda like an s-video plug, with a number of prongs and what not. In my experience, I have broken many s video cords and was not wanting to deal with trying to get a new AC adapter. This drive came with the brick less cord. The plug portion is just a normal plug, kinda like how my other External HDD plugs in and my laptops and most other device. No lining anything up, just plug it in and you are good. So that is a perk. Another thing, the brick I hear got pretty hot. Since I do not have a brick, that is not a problem. That brings me to my next point... The drive is not cooled by a fan. It has vents, yes. I have been transferring data to it for the past 5 hours and the device is only mildly warm. It is not hot. It is no hotter than my other HDD. It is also very quiet. The plug is not hot either. There is a single blue indicator light on the drive near the AC plug which blinks when in use, is solid when idle and off when, well, off. The drive only uses USB 2.0, no firewire. It is sufficiently fast at copying data. It was running in the 20 mb/sec range when copying from my desktop, so not too bad. I have seen worse. The USB cable provided is short, almost too short, and kinda crummy quality. Oh well, I had a few extras lying around anyways. If you do not have any lying around, don't fret, you can find usb cords for pocket change online. Those were some of the issues I wish I had known before buying, but all worked out for me and I am very happy with the purchase. Free shipping and it arrived in about 3 days from ordering. Nice job WD on a great drive and buy on a great transaction. I hope this helps somebody out there. I do recommend this drive to anybody looking for a cheap and useful drive.
 
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Honestly, you just plug it in and it's ready to use. This was a great deal when I got it at $84.99 and now (as of 12/3/08) I'm seeing a price of 79.99 & no tax & Free Shipping - that comes out to about 12.5 cents per GB. I did a fair amount of searching and that's about the best price going. Also, buy.com gives you the option of using Google Checkout which I like. I don't know any specific details about performance specs but I can't tell a difference between it and my internal hard drive and I'm just running a 3.0GHz with a plain Pentium 4 and 512KB RAM. I'd say this was the best (and easiest) add on piece of equipment I've ever gotten for my computer.
 
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Delivered on time, on price. Thanks!
 
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Came promptly, plug and play set up easily, reformated it in NTFS takes a while, but otherwise works well. Seems a little slow to initially access drive from "Send To" the first time. but otherwise seems adequate. Lots of room now for storage.
 
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I got this drive to replace an Iomega external drive that turned out to be incompatible with Vista. I use it for archiving data files and backup -- just basics. The drive works well; it's reasonably fast at writing and reading files, has quiet operation, and is unobtrusive (even good looking) on the desk top. Unlike other external drives I've owned (HD, Zip, SyQuest, thumb drives) it comes with no software, backup or otherwise. You buy a hard drive, and that's all you get (w/ power supply and cable, of course). But if you don't need those frills (and who does, really?), this is a great drive, and at 12.5 cents a gigabyte, an incredible bargain. And installation is as easy as just plugging it in.
 
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Took it out of the box, plugged it into the plug and then the USB and that was it. I started transfering files within seconds.
 
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Very quiet running unit. Just connect the USB cable and plug it in (no on/off switch) After an hour or so the case seemed pretty warm (don't know what is normal) I have two other ext. HDs and they can get warm like that too. I placed objects under each end to allow more air under the case. Transferred nearly 500 gb and it took hours. Each folder containing approx 10gb would take about 10 minutes to transfer the zip files from a 2.0ghz cpu. As I said, don't know if it's normal speed or temp, but I plan to purchase a small fan to place next to the harddrive to keep it cooler (just in case)
 
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This is the second USB drive on my machine and I had of my computer hanging when rebooting until I removed the harddrive. I could unplug the drive unitl I was up, but it was a pain. I called WD costumer service and they helped me configure my bios to bootup problem free. Works great!
 
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Cool hard drive, reliable, solid! Huge space, for a small price tag. Easy plug and play, a little...hefty, but portability isn't the "sales pitch" for this drive; storage space is! If you need a simple, functional hard drive, and don't really care if it's all cutesy, shiny, and pink or blue, this is a great deal!
 
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So far so good. Only draw back is you have to reformat it to NTFS in order to copy files > 4gb. Other than that, it has worked really great.
 
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great drive, great price. setup trivial. like it ought to be.
 
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when a cheap disk just get the job done, and , done very well, I would say cheap is good. This disk worked just fine and easy to install. now it is 110$ something, I am lucky to get it with 90 $. haha
 
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My headline says it all! Easy setup and so far a great product. Does what it is advertised to do!
 
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I bought this and I am using it all the time. Easy to hook up and for this price you can not beat it.
 
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This is decent hard drive for storage purpose. I use it to save movies etc. Good price and free shipping.
 
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so far so good. trivial install. seems to be working fine.
 
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I purchased this Hard Drive because I needed storage for my recorded television. It took awhile, but I easily converted the file system to Windows Media Center friendly NTFS format, and store the recorded television directly to it. It's absolutely quiet, and is rather sleek looking with the aluminum finish. Virtually no difficulty in installation, you literally plug and play. Hope this review helps!
 
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Had this product for 3 weeks and its working great. Fast shipping and great service.
 
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My husband sets up all my electronic equipment for me and he said the installation "was about as simple as falling off a tree." Just plug it in to a USB port. Couldn't be happier or more at ease now that I have a backup. (I lost my harddrive on my old computer last year and was not able to retrieve everything. Price was great!
 
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Silent, plug and play. Only way to improve it would be to give it a longer USB cable, but the existing one is fine if you keep it within 10 feet of your computer :)
 
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This was the best deal that I could find for a drive with this capacity. It's been working fine for me. I just plugged it in and it was ready to go.
 
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While not everything I have used from WD has been spectacular, they seem to be getting better as time goes on. This is a very well built product that's easy to set up and use. In my case, I have a Mac (Apple) environment, so I had to initialize the drive to set it up for HTFS. Other than that, it was pretty much plug and play from there out. The drive has worked well as an NAS drive on my AirPort Extreme so far, and I expect it will continue to for some time.
 
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great service...quickly shipped...easy to use, solid machine.
 
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Plug and play...installed itself in seconds and was up and running. Perfect for backing up everything I wanted. And how can you beat the price....
 
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Works as advertised. Great value for the extra 140GB over usual 500GB dont forget to take the coupon if it's still available. Will be using to archive media files together with an existing Lacie external hd. Rugged construction will be good to carry around but for the size of this storage I'd be really caution not to be dropped. So far it's working very well. ALSO GREAT DOING BUSINESS WITH BUY.COM, they really deliver.
 
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So far so good. Been in use about a month. This external hard drive was easy to set up. I am currently using it with a dish network hd dvr. I have no problems and I think I tripled my storage. Very satisfied.
 
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For $89 bucks it was an excellent deal! Bought 2 of them! Quite the external hard drive! Seems very reliable! Thanks to Buy and those who make this product at a great price to buy and the product!
 
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