I bought a Western Digital Mybook for backing up my design work after reading a review, admittedly they were using PC, but it said it was compatible with Macs. The Mybook seemed like a good buy as it was pretty cheap storage with a large capacity. When I tried to use it with my Mac it was incredibly temperamental, a lot of the time it wouldn’t mount or it would lose connection when connecting it with either firewire or USB.
I was about to give up with it but after trawling the net found a solution. So if anybody else if having the same trouble instead of connecting the hard drive directly to your mac, use a Firewire hub, it seems to be working for me. Alternatively if you don’t want/need a firewire hub you can chain it via another firewire device. I also reformatted mine to mac format (though it will work without I was having problems with it).
If you are a Mac user looking for a hard drive I would avoid this one, but if you need a work-round for a device you already have give a firewire hub a try.
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This is dissapointing for me as I already own one mybook and was planning on getting another. SO far mine has been fine, but these stories make me nervous. I think one you have had a drive fail and lose data you become paranoid with every drive you own.
I’ve heard LaCie are the best backup drives for Mac. I’m on a PC, so I don’t have any experience with it. For my external backup, I just bought a case and a separate hard drive. Doing that is usually cheaper than buying a pre-fab one. I also have three hard drives installed in my computer; the main two are a raid 0 and third is a separate backup. Can you tell I’m paranoid about losing my data?!
my mybook was really tempermental. I never managed to use its backup feature because it would dismount too frequently. I never got to the point where I solved the issue because I knocked it over (on the table…it fell on its side) and I broke something inside. I lost all the data and was quoted £300-400 to recover it. Forget that. I’m thinking of getting a Buffalo Tech “linkstation pro”. Anyone had any experience of them?
I’ve been using a MyBook for the last year on a daily basis and so far I’ve only really had one problem. When I dismount it, it appears to work fine but then throws an error when I unplug it. If this happens, I can’t remount it again until I’ve restarted OSX.
Apart from that, I really like it. Especially the nice fast transfer you get from FireWire.
Have you ever tried to MAC HFS format over the MyBook? Because, it’s coming with default Windows formatted. I’m using MyBook also, I haven’t seen any like that problem before.
huh, it’s very coincidental that I read about MyBook on your blog, Tara. A month ago my husband’s PC got some nasty virus, so we had to re-format his computer and re-install everything – we’ve tried everything to get rid of the viruses. But before re-formating, my husband got MyBook hard-drive, and backed up all his files there. Afterwards I quickly formatted his PC and re-installed everything, my husband didn’t put back all his files from MyBook to the freshly installed PC right away, but when he tried accessing MyBook (a brand new) a few days later, he couldn’t get it to work. I tried connecting it to my Mac – no luck, wouldn’t recognize that drive at all. Later we tried connecting it to our friend’s PC – still no luck, the drive is not recognizable. My husband contacted the store he got it from, ’cause it is still under warranty, but they said the only thing they can do is replace MyBook… What about the files? They referred to a company that restores the drives, but they charge $400 for that.
So now he dismantled the entire drive and we’ll try hooking it up as a 2nd hard drive, see if we can get access to the files…
Hi thanks for your all you comments there seems to be ixed opinions on this drive.
Vivien did you try linking the drive through another firewire device or hub, thats what worked for me?
I own a Lacie firewire drive and it works perfectly fine between both Macs and PCs. But they’re very expensive compared to others that work just as well. The Apple store has great discounts for external harddrives a lot of the time, for those of you who are shopping around for Mac-friendly, check out the latest deals.
I own two LaCie drives (one I’ve had for just about 5 years now) and both are a dream. Since buying my first Mac 14 years ago, I’ve owned several kinds of external drives with LaCie being the best hands-down. I know they’re expensive, but they truly are worth the money.
My Book WD Premium Edition will not show up with a drive letter. Under disk management it is there and if I click on it..