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Yes it works with power strips, Yes it can be shared on a network!!

I’ve been using this drive for about a month now. BUY IT! I don’t know if there are some defective drives out there or what but several of the negative claims sounded very odd to me. The first thing I did when I got the drive was to plug it into a power strip.. It came right up.

Next, since I’m running a home network with several computers and a wireless laptop, I shared out the drive on my network. It worked like a champ. I can read and write data to it without a problem. Here are the steps you should use to properly share a drive in Windows XP:
1. On the computer you’re sharing, open My Computer.

2. Right-click the hard drive you want to share and choose Sharing and Security from the shortcut menu that appears.

The Sharing tab appears, displaying a message that warns you that sharing a drive isn’t a good idea. Beneath the message is a link that you can click to indicate that you understand the risk but want to share the drive. Then the Sharing tab changes to reveal the options that allow you to share the drive.

3. Select the Share This Folder on the Network option.

4. Enter a name for the share.

5. Select the Allow Network Users to Change My Files option.

If you don’t select this option, network users can view files but can’t create new files or modify existing files. Because you’re a network user when you want to work on a file on this computer from a different computer, there’s not much point in restricting what network users can do. However, the security in Windows XP is rather complicated, and it gets more complicated when you share folders.

6. Click OK.

Now, to access your new share on another computer you’ll need two pieces of info: the name of your computer with the drive and the name of the share you just created. To find your computer name, right click on “My Computer” and choose Properties. Click on the “Computer Name” tab. In the middle of the page you’ll see “Full computer name:” followed by your full computer name. If there is a dot after the computer name, you can ignore it. Write down your computer name and the name of the share you just created and head over to one of your network machines that you’d like to access the drive on.

Right click on “My Computer” and choose “Map Network Drive”. A window with two fields will come up “Drive” and Folder” and a check box “Reconnect at logon”.

In the Drive box, pick the drive letter you want the drive to have in My Computer. In the folder box, type the following using the name of your computer with the drive and the name of the share you created:

computernamesharename

Where computername is the computer you hooked up the shared mybook to and sharename is the name of the share you created.

If you want the computer to automatically reconnect to the share every time it reboots, you can check the reconnect at logon box.

Just click Finish and you’re done!

Now, back to the My Book 500gb Premium Edition. I find it to be very quiet and unobtrusive. It has two blue rings around the power button that light up. The outside ring is a power and drive activity light that will flash and move when you are reading or writing data to the drive. The inside ring is actually a drive capacity light that tells you how much room is left on the drive! If your drive is half full, the half of the inside ring will be lit!

The center of the two rings is a power button. It shuts the drive completely off. One thing to note on this: when using the included backup software, you can (and should) schedule your backups to run automatically at regular times. If you power off the drive by pushing the middle power button, the drive cannot power itself back up automatically to complete your backup.

I have found that you don’t really need to power off the drive anyway as it will slow itself down and go to a standby mode if it isn’t accessed for a long time. The power stays on and the blue rings stay lit, but it does go into a power save mode. It will wake back up right away when you want to access it.

The drive also monitors the pc and knows when you turn off your computer. It automatically turns itself off when your pc is off and back on when your pc is turned back on! This is actually a big deal as most of the “do it yourself” external drive kits have a hard power button and the thing will be on until you manually turn it off.

There are 3 different flavors of this drive. The Essential Edition pretty much comes with the drive with USB connectivity and that’s it. This works fine for a lot of people.

The Premium Edition comes with the drive, USB and Firewire connectivity and software for your computer including a backup program that is so easy that your grand parents can use it as well as google desktop search to help you find files on your computer just as easy as googling things on the web.

The Pro Edition is identical to the Premium except that it comes with a faster Firewire port for those who need it and it is white instead of black (Probably to match Apple Computers since those are the most likely ones to use a faster Firewire port).

I find that the drive does not get hot at all. If you put your hand on the vents on the top of the drive it will be warm, but that’s it. I’m not worried about heat build up on this drive.

Installation:
The software that is included in the Premium Edition is actually on the hard drive itself and once you attach the drive to the computer and power it on, the drive will be recognized and installed by windows and the software install screen will usually pop up automatically. If for some reason this doesn’t come up automatically, you can open My Computer, click on the new drive letter and click on the “autorun” file. This should make the software run. Just follow a basic simple install choosing whether you want to install the backup software and google optional pieces and your done.

As for speed, I haven’t done any scientific benchmarks, but I’ve copied a few 4 gig test files back and forth and I’m quite happy with the speed.

In conclusion, the drive works, requires no maintenance, setup is a breeze and it looks cool on top of it all. Also, people complained that you can’t plug it into a power strip, I did not have that problem, people said you can’t network it, I was able to network it easily.

One more note. People need to realize the tech support terminology can be misleading. When you call tech support and say you’re having trouble networking the my book drive, if they tell you that networking is not supported, that does NOT mean that you can’t do it, it just means that tech support doesn’t think that is a problem with the drive so they won’t spend the time to tell you how to do it. If you are trying to figure out how to do something try doing a search with google or A9.com like “how to share a drive in windows xp”. You’d be suprised at the things you’ll learn!

Update (2/6/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen.

The featured review for this product, Western Digital My Book External Hard Drive - 500 GB Electronics, was written by J. Sundquist.

The average rating for this item is 3.7 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.