Western Digital 1TB My Book Review

Back in December of 2007 we purchased the USB version of Western Digital’s My Book Essential Edition 1TB external hard drive for £159.99 from Amazon. Since then the price has dropped to £89.98. Ouch.

Having always purchased Western Digital hard drives and never seeing any disk or cable failures it becomes difficult to understand how so many people see these drives fail. Its either pure luck on our part or people are not treating these things correctly. In reality it’s probably a mixture of the two. Issue number one, putting all your eggs in one basket, one terabyte is still a significant amount of data. If you have the desk space and an extra socket it may be smarter to spread the risk and purchase two 500GB hard drives for a similar price.

Almost 11 months have passed problem free, the drive looks great, its very quiet, fast and we get 931.5GB of actual storage. The software that comes with device is fairly abysmal, as long as your computer is relatively new (less than 8 years old) it should work out the box without the need to install any software or drivers.

On Amazon you might find some odd reviews and some plain untrue, this one probably slots into the ‘odd’ category. Ms. S. Johnson explained how her 6-month-old hard drive failed,

“Apart from the occasional rebooting of explorer from this ‘My Book’ I thought well that’s a quirk - today there was a bump it jumped about an inch in the air (NOTE - IT JUMPED BY ITSELF - I did not knock it - the inertia of the internal failure was that bad).”

Mr. R. C. Dawson stated,

“If you use Mac, do not buy a Western Digital Drive. It will not partition and cannot be reformatted for Mac. There are tutorials available trying to solve this. They do not work. WD support is useless. The drive is a waste of time and money. Avoid.”

This statement simply isn’t true. Our drive is formatted with NTFS and is fully readable by our Mac Pro. Mac doesn’t come with the ability to write to NTFS out the box. However software is readily available that allows you to write to NTFS as well as read from it.

Although our experiences have shown Western Digital to be only a shining beacon of reliability (our 250GB WD external hard drive purchased June 2005 works as if new) there seems to be an overwhelming number of people who would disagree.

Beware when purchasing hard drives, due to moving parts they will never be 100% reliable.

Garmin Forerunner 50 Review

Gadget geeks need exercise like anyone else, however in the time between leaving their place of residence and partaking in a run they can suffer withdrawal symptoms. No longer, thanks to the ‘Garmin Forerunner 50 + Footpod’. The watch acts as a regular, yet rather sleek digital device used for presenting the time. The real beauty comes when pressing the ‘mode’ button that moves you into ‘train’ mode.

While running its possible to check your speed, distance travelled as well as time taken, all this data is wirelessly transmitted from your footpod to your watch. The clever part comes next. Once you’ve cooled down and showered its time to meticulously analyse your journey. This is made possible with the Garmin Training Center, insert the USB dongle (included along with the watch and footpod) into your computer (after previously installing the required software). ANT Agent will allow you to wirelessly transfer the data from the watch to the USB dongle, once the data has been transferred Training Center allows you to view the statistics and a graph of your run or cycle.

Our only gripe is that we purchased too early, bought at Amazon for £64.99 (roughly $100), a few days later we noticed it dropped to £37.99 (roughly $60).

Pros are that it’s affordable, sleek, easy to use, reasonably accurate and wireless. Cons are a less than one-year battery life and an undersized manual.

Powerisers 2008 Model Review

Powerisers have been around for a few years now, with the 2008 model recently released we thought we would give the now heavily tested (hopefully) Powerisers a go. After watching YouTube (an example shown below), we thought that it would be a piece of cake.

Powerisers are jumping stilts that claim to allow you to jump 6 feet high and this claim is substantiated by those flipping over cars on YouTube.

It turns out that its actually harder than it looks… a lot harder than it looks. However, after a few hours of hard, but enjoyable messing about on these bouncy stilts you start to get the hang of it, bouncing and running adequately.

There a lot of fun and I think well worth a purchase, we got ours from Skatehut.co.uk and they seem to work very well. At £199.95 they aren’t cheap, but we still think they are well worth a gamble!