Disenfranchised in my most recent studio upgrade, it sits forlorn at the end of my table, not connected to anything — a Western Digital MyBook Premium 750 GB external hard drive. It was meant to be a key piece in my new setup — a nice, big drive to hold my Time Machine backups. Instead, it is less than a paperweight. Right now, it’s a brick.

Western Digital is a pretty respected name in the business and the MyBook got more than adequate reviews when it was new. The thing probably came out in about 2007, about the time I got mine. It is moderately small, about the size of a trade paperback book, and stylishly designed.

WD MyBook Premium

But its first, immediately-obvious problem is that the drive was slow — even for that day and age. Now, four years later, it’s positively pokey. Second was that the included EMC Retrospect Express Backup software was atrocious. Instead of me being able to run nice, consistent, overnight, versioned backups, I too often got processes that froze and crashed my machine, corrupting backup data. I tried other solutions, which were better, but still didn’t provide robust, affordable, reliable backup within my budget (i.e. incredibly cheap or free). Finally, with my new Mac Mini and Apple’s built-in Time Machine, I thought the time had finally come to put this brawny mother into the game.

No go. The Mac Mini could only recognize the drive intermittently. I couldn’t consistently read or write large files to it or format it. It obviously couldn’t be used for backup. I checked a variety of forums to find out why this might be. There were no shortage of people complaining about similar issues — there were just few effective answers. I tried a bunch of software-related fixes but nothing helped. I saw a lot of folks complaining about cheap hardware used in the hard drive enclosure. Many people just yanked the drive itself into a new enclosure and had success with that. Hardware is not my core competency, so that’s a stunt I’ll try some other time.

Western Digital has discontinued the drive so what little support still being done for the model is sporadic and desultory. In several forums, users who wrote Western Digital quoted e-mail responses indicating that WD didn’t much care, if at all. Apple was no more helpful. The only people deeply motivated to solve this issue were us poor schlubs who were affected.

Anyway, the brick sits there, unusable. All in all, it was never particularly useful, given the cost. And I, as a customer, feel ill-used. There are other prominent manufacturers out there like Seagate and LaCie. I’ll try one of them next time.