WD 2tb mybook essential
We picked up a Western Digital 2tb mybook essential with USB2 and 3 capability last week (April 2012), on sale for about $120 from Staples.
It is an external USB hard drive and was picked up because the older 1tb drive was getting full 🙂
We had a lot of problems with it getting to be recognized on a windows XP system and finally got it working on a windows 7 system. It seems to take a long time to initially load its drivers. In any event, it was plugged back into an old windows xp system (p4-2.4 GHz 1gb) with a wireless mouse and wireless keyboard and usb webcam.
The file transfer speeds were abysmal. On the order of kilobytes/second at times. Probably the wireless keyboard and mouse dongles were USB 1.1 devices, so we rearranged for them all to be on the rear motherboard usb ports and the WD2tb on one of the front ones. No difference. Tried many combinations and it seemed that all USB ports downgraded to usb1.1 when any usb 1.1 device was plugged in.
That was a major bummer. It rendered the WD 2tb drive useless.
One last thing to try was to add a spare PCI card with USB2 ports. That worked. It stayed independent of the other USB bus on the motherboard and the drive transfer rates came up to speed on the order of megabytes/second if not more.
A few more days of reorganizing files and we will be ready to repurpose the 1tb drive as a data backup drive that can be taken offsite for safety.