When Leopard was released, I wanted to transition from my current backup solution which was SuperDuper to a network based external hard drive to Apple’s Time Machine.  Before switching completely to Macs I had always put together my own hardware from buying parts and putting a PC together to buying external hard drive enclosures and sticking my own hard drives in them.  This isn’t a bad way to do things.  You definitely get more for you money.  The main reason for my transition is I wanted support.  If something failed I wanted to just send the entire thing in and not have to worry about it.  So this is one example of that.  I went with Western Digital drives because they were relatively inexpensive and they look nice next to my Macs.

I own a few different models of their drives each with different sizes and different port options.  Since I was using this primarily for Time Machine, I decided to get the most amount of storage for my dollar without the fancy extra ports I probably won’t use for this application.  I went with two of the 1TB MyBook Essential because it offers a decent amount of storage and I’m not paying extra for any other hardware interfaces since it only has a USB port.

What you get in the box is pretty simple.  You get the hard drive, a power cable, USB cable, and there was probably a small manual in there as well.  It’s easy enough where you probably won’t need the manual, but its there if you get stumped.

I started out with it plugged into my desktop computers.  This gave direct access to Time Machine backups to those machines.  I also setup the backups on my laptop computers to point to those same drives.  I’ve never had any issues using it and I am always able to see and use Time Machine as it is intended.  Recently since Apple enabled Time Machine over Airport Extreme (which I’m reading is unsupported), I moved my two MyBook Essentials to a USB hub off the Airport Extreme.  I had to start my backups over since I wasn’t really sure how to transition from one to the other.  For network backups it stores the Time Machine backup a different way.  I was okay with starting them over.  It’s been running for at least a month now and everything is working.

As far as hard drive performance goes, since I just use it for backups I can’t really say how it performs in disk intensive things for large types of media.  I suppose backups are pretty disk intensive, but after the initial chunk it’s small backups incrementally over time.  I don’t really notice a slow down on my machines, but then again I’ve never really notice a difference in Leopard when it’s running backups or not.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the drive.  It hasn’t let me down.  These two drives are two of five Western Digital drives and they’ve always seem to work as intended.  A buddy’s drive died on him, and Western Digital was able to replace it in a timely manner.  Things like hard drives die from time to time so making the replacement under warranty as painless as possible always help.  As always if you have any questions or would like me to test anything on the drive, let me know.