Western Digital My Book Essential External Hard Drive on Linux

I decided to sell my desktop computer and use my laptop exclusively, I had no need to keep another computer and since I was only using it for doing backups I decided it would be better to save some space.

I choose to get a Western Digital because they have been so reliable to me in the past. Of the external hard drives available at Wal-Mart it initially appeared not the be the best value. A Seagate right next to it was also a terabtye in storage capacity but also had USB 3.0 capability for only $15 dollars more. The WD Essentials has only USB 2.0 and I know that 3.0 is supposed to be considerable faster than 2.0. However, for me, my laptop is only USB 1.0 so this didn’t factor into it; also, because I am only using this for backups, time isn’t much of a factor and I prefer to have the reliability of the Western Digital name.

The My Book Essential HD has a capacity meter on the front to display how full the disk is. I learned though, unfortunately, that this only works through the Windows driver and using the NTFS file system. Because I’m going to be using this for backups on Linux with ext4 this feature isn’t available.

Since I have a Windows system installed I retrospectively learned that it is a good idea to install the driver/software for the drive there to setup the drive for only the reason so that I could disable the VCD. The Virtual CD Drive is a built-in memory chip that registers to the operating system as a regular CD drive. On it it contains the driver/software installer and manual. As far as the driver/software goes its nicer than I’ve seen of other hardware’s software, it was lightweight, easy to use, and with no frills. For Linux though the driver/software is unecessary as it is automatically recognized and working out of the box. I disabled the VCD drive with the Windows software though to keep the VCD from popping up when I loaded my Linux desktop.

I ran a S.M.A.R.T. conveyance test and extended test on it then did a thorough badblocks write test that took about 24 hours… all tests passed.

Formatting to ext4, the drive works perfectly in Linux without any additional configuration (besides noatime. I’ve been using the hard drive the last couple of months and I’m real happy with it: it’s small, quiet, and has done it’s job without a hitch.