I've owned two of these specific drives, one 2tb and one 1tb.



I felt the need to write a review to help people sort through these reviews with a little confidence.



1. ALMOST ALL HARD DRIVES (both internal and external) HAVE POOR REVIEWS. For reference, here are some published figures about hard drive failure rates. These rates are based upon drives sold between October 1st, 2010 and April 1, 2011, and the percentage is how many failed before October 2011. The sample groups for each brand are at least 500 drives. These are the 4 major 3.5" hard drive manufacturers.



Samsung 1.5% failed

Seagate 1.8% failed

Western Digital 2.0% failed

Hitachi 3.0% failed



As you can see, all the failure rates are very low. These figures also include damage caused in shipping, and failures due to abuse. So, you can imagine, that the failure rate of drives that are well cared for are much lower.



2. ALL 3.5" EXTERNAL DRIVES REQUIRE AN EXTERNAL POWER SOURCE (for now anyways). USB 3.0 may be able to provide enough power to feed a 3.5" drive, but I've yet to see it. Thunderbolt may be able to as well (somebody correct me if this is already available). But, for the time being, if you want the massive, affordable storage of a 3.5" drive externally, you'll have to find a wall socket. If you'd rather just plug in a USB cable, and not worry about power, get a "portable" external hard drive. These drive use 2.5" (laptop) hard drives that are capable of running on USB supplied power in most cases. The drives are also more expensive per GB of storage, and are currently only available as large as 1TB (I think a 1.5TB exists, but isn't yet widely sold).



3. These drives connect via USB 2.0. This is a slow type of interface by today's standards. If you're frequently transferring a massive amount of data, you may want to consider a faster interface (such as eSATA, USB 3.0, or firewire). The USB 2.0 interface is more than adequate for media playback, weekly backups, or any task that you're not impatiently waiting on.



4. Many times, a failed external drive still has a perfectly good hard drive sitting inside it. If you've lost important data, or you just want to salvage your drive, you should consider opening your external's case and installing the drive internally in a desktop or installing it in another external 3.5" case. Cheap 3.5" external cases can easily be found on Amazon and other sites. Docking stations are also reasonably priced, and very convenient.



My experience with these particular drives has been great. Neither of the ones I own have failed me in any way. In fact, the only hard drive related failure I've ever had, was a Seagate external drive that I purchased in 2007. The drive itself never failed, but the USB to SATA interface inside the case did. No worries, I pulled the drive out of the case and still got plenty of use out of it (before 500GB became too little to bother with).



The drives contain Western Digital Caviar Green internal hard drives. These drives are very quiet, very cool, and fast enough for anything but a boot drive. They are an excellent choice for media storage in home theater PCs. They are especially quiet inside the Elements design external case, because there is no ventilation. You have to try pretty hard to hear one of these drives.



Western Digital has offered me my full warranty on one of these drives, even after I had opened to case, and removed the external drive to install it internally. Their customer service was knowledgeable, courteous, and efficient.



The interface inside these drives can be used on a variety of hard drives. I've used it with many other desktop hard drives, laptop hard drives and even solid state drives. The one oddity about it is... it absolutely refuses to read any Seagate drive I've tried it with.



The cases themselves are cheap, but that's not necessarily bad. They are sturdy, durable, quiet, and good looking. They can be stood vertically or laid horizontally. I'm not sure what more you could ask of a case.



All in all, while these aren't the absolute best buy in external drives at the moment... they are very good, and they are certainly worth having. I wouldn't pass on a sale to buy another.