# WD MyBook Discussion Thread (Moved from External Hard Drives that Work)



## bobukcat (Dec 20, 2005)

I think you might want to take the WD MyBooK 750GB Premium Edition off of that list or at least add a question mark. I can tranfer music to and from mine fine but if it's connected and turned on it causes SERIOUS receiver issues such as sticking at the "Acquiring Signal" or Downloading Guide Data screen after every nightly or forced reboot, spontaneous reboots, etc. It rendered my 622 worse than anything I ever had to put up with on the old 921 until I disconnected it and there is at least one other person reporting the same problems with the 500GB version.


----------



## jcord51 (Feb 1, 2003)

bobukcat said:


> I think you might want to take the WD MyBooK 750GB Premium Edition off of that list or at least add a question mark. I can tranfer music to and from mine fine but if it's connected and turned on it causes SERIOUS receiver issues such as sticking at the "Acquiring Signal" or Downloading Guide Data screen after every nightly or forced reboot, spontaneous reboots, etc. It rendered my 622 worse than anything I ever had to put up with on the old 921 until I disconnected it and there is at least one other person reporting the same problems with the 500GB version.


I have the Western Digital My Book Essential WDG1U7500N, and have had no issues. I haven't recorded any music onto the drive. I leave mine on at all times, but know that the hard drive itself spins down when not in use. The drive has a circular display that blinks when the HD is spinning. Do you use your drive in the same manner?


----------



## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

Ok I moved this posts to their own thread so that we can get some more discussion on the WD MyBook and see if we can come up with reasons why some are seeing issues while others are not. Socceter indicated that he had a drive where it appeared to work on one 622 while it had problems on the other. He mentioned there was a difference in bootstrap version though I am not sure if this is a red herring or not. 

I have a My WD 250GB MyBook Essential drive and I am not seeing any issues. I use it just as jcord51 does. Bobcat are you using yours any differently and might make sense to compare bootstrap versions. Couple of question all to be thinking about for this thread. Another data point is mine has never been hooked up to a PC. I assume bobukcat that when you say you are able to transfer music you mean before you hooked it up to your 622 and wiped the drive. 

If anyone else is having issues, please chime in and if have your hardware version from the back of your 622 please report it. Also state if you are using this on a 622 or 722. 

There is a lot of people having good success with the WD My book drives so lets try and see if we can track down if we have a differences to pinpoint what might be causing issues on some WD units.


----------



## twindaddy (Feb 5, 2007)

This is slightly off topic, but I think readers considering a WD MyBook should be aware. I've bought and returned two of these drives because they are noisy (loud fan sound). I posted this on another thread and most people responded that I must have gotten a bad drive and there's was extremely quiet. I don't think I got two bad drives with identical noise issues. Perhaps, many people won't be bothered by the noise. Noise is very subjective after all. But, if you're an audiophile like me and you want to avoid any extra noise to your system, you should think twice before getting one of these drives.

How loud is loud? Well, from ten feet away on my couch I can hear the WD book OVER the 622. It's especially obvious when I turn *off* the WD and hear the delta. In comparison, my Seagate Freeagent drive (despite problems after waking up -- see that thread for the details) is not audible from 1 foot away.


----------



## boylehome (Jul 16, 2004)

Ron,

I have the W/D MyBook 500GB Premium Edition. For some reason it caused problems when the ViP resets or does the nightly reset/fsck. When powering the ViP, it would be stuck in the attention 015 screen or the EPG download screen. It mostly worked fine but trying to access it after not using it for several minutes would cause pop-up screens, indicating that it is an unsupported device, then another another pop-up screen indicating that a media device has been connected. Many times when playing back a program from the W/D MyBook Premium, the audio and video would begin to chug, going from normal to freezing then back to normal.

I quit using it because I like having the EHDD connected. I now use a Fantoms 500GB EHDD. It works extremely well with the VIP.

In reading other posts, it sounds like the essential edition works fine but the premium edition doesn't.


----------



## dragon762 (Feb 1, 2006)

I purchased a WD MyBook 750GB two days ago, and I have not experienced any problem. It was never hooked to a PC.

My drive is whisper quiet and the transfers are very fast. My drive is quieter than the 622.


----------



## AVJohnnie (Jul 27, 2004)

I have one of the MyBook 750GB Essentials and have had none of the reported problems. I have tried to cook-up worst case situations just to mess it up too -- sort of "throwing the book at it", pardon the pun.

So far I've transferred about 100GB to/from and back again and have had no trouble at all accessing any of it. I've transferred content both individually and in batches. I've transfered while other 622 recordings were in progress; while watching recorded and live events; while fiddling with the trick-play. Nothing seems to mess it up.

Also, as best as I can tell there is no fan in this model MyBook, but it runs quite cool and is dead silent.

I attached four rubber stick-on feet to the side of mine so that sits nicely on its side atop the 622.

All that said - so far, so good, but I'll report it here if it begins to act up.


----------



## Spike375 (Dec 4, 2005)

I'm using a MyBook 750GB Essential, and have had freezing issues while transferring. I'm never doing anything more than just watching live tv when it freezes. I've gotten scenarios where both picture and sound freezes and other times the picture freezes and the sound doesn't. When I see it happen I will try pressing a button on the remote to see if it will respond but it doesn't. 

I have even tried to keep the size of my transfers as low as possible to see if it made a difference but, the last two times it froze I was only transferring 1 HD movie at a time. I also try to wait past the estimated finish time to see if it will respond again but it never does. 

When it freezes the hard drive light continues to flash. I have always fixed this by doing a power button reset, and the files I tried to move remained on the internal hard drive. I've also always gone to "manage device" first before I transfer to make sure the drive has spun up. This is the only problem I've experienced so far.
It hasn't happened TOO often, but it is starting to get annoying.


----------



## ls7dude (Jan 31, 2007)

I have the WD MyBook 500GB. While I wouldn't say it transfers blisteringly fast, it is seriously not loud. As a matter of fact, I don't even hear it. 

I am having problems when I try to transfer stuff over while watching TV. It seems as if I send more than 1 at a time, it locks up.


----------



## bobukcat (Dec 20, 2005)

dragon762 said:


> I purchased a WD MyBook 750GB two days ago, and I have not experienced any problem. It was never hooked to a PC.
> 
> My drive is whisper quiet and the transfers are very fast. My drive is quieter than the 622.


Is it the "Essential" or "Premium" edition? The Premium includes a Firewire port (not usable with the 622 of course) where the Essential only has USB 2.0? I only bought the Premium edition because it was on sale for $70 cheaper than the Essential edition.


----------



## bobukcat (Dec 20, 2005)

twindaddy said:


> This is slightly off topic, but I think readers considering a WD MyBook should be aware. I've bought and returned two of these drives because they are noisy (loud fan sound). I posted this on another thread and most people responded that I must have gotten a bad drive and there's was extremely quiet. I don't think I got two bad drives with identical noise issues. Perhaps, many people won't be bothered by the noise. Noise is very subjective after all. But, if you're an audiophile like me and you want to avoid any extra noise to your system, you should think twice before getting one of these drives.
> 
> How loud is loud? Well, from ten feet away on my couch I can hear the WD book OVER the 622. It's especially obvious when I turn *off* the WD and hear the delta. In comparison, my Seagate Freeagent drive (despite problems after waking up -- see that thread for the details) is not audible from 1 foot away.


I'll have to agree with the "it's not loud" crowd. Mine is so quiet that the 622 is many orders louder and if it weren't for the blue light I'm not sure I could tell it was running.


----------



## bobukcat (Dec 20, 2005)

jcord51 said:


> I have the Western Digital My Book Essential WDG1U7500N, and have had no issues. I haven't recorded any music onto the drive. I leave mine on at all times, but know that the hard drive itself spins down when not in use. The drive has a circular display that blinks when the HD is spinning. Do you use your drive in the same manner?


Sorry, I meant programs, not music (I must have been thinking about my PC USB drive which is completely unrelated) but I was leaving it on all the time until it made my 622 unusable. I hooked it up to the 622 right out of the box so it was never connected to a PC or anything else.

The trend seems to be that the Essential edition is fine but not the Premium edition.


----------



## Rob Glasser (Feb 22, 2005)

Been gone on vacation so a little late to the topic but I am using a MyBook Essential and it works fine as well, definitely seems to be something with the premium edition model.


----------



## secretservices (Oct 29, 2006)

I have the WD MyBook 500GB Premium, and its seems to be working fine. What are the problems with this model?
The only issue I can think of is when I go to access it....it gives me the You need to Activate screen....but it then wakes up and works just fine.


----------



## drsimnal (Sep 26, 2004)

Just bought a MyBook 750GB Essential. Hooked it up tonight (though the CSR spoke just enough english to insist on "finding the hard drive channel" to turn it on; I had no faith he managed to do it, but it actually did work!). Am transferring 46 GB right now, so I can't say if it will cause issues with my 622, but so far so good. Set up was very easy; by far the worst part was trying to get the CSR to understand I wasn't wanting to add some strange channel. And it's totally quiet. The only way I knew it was still going was to see the green circle blinking. I'm going to leave it to finish and will check it out tomorrow night.


----------



## JSIsabella (Oct 20, 2006)

I bought the WD 500GB Essential on the 16th and hooked it up to my 622. I moved all the episodes of Planet Earth over to it in one batch. It worked perfectly. I have moved a few other "saved" movies over to it, again with no problems.

I can watch them, and use the fast forward, etc.

I have tried turning it off, and leaving it on - both work, but I am going to leave it on, since the drive spins down.

In my opinion, using USB is not the fastest transfer method, but it has worked fine for me. My unit is very cool and dead silent.

I don't know if putting it on top of a very warm 622 is a good idea. I kept mine off to the side. 

I also placed it as far away from my speaker as possible. The thought of a hard disk next to a big magnet in the speaker box did not seem like the smartest idea to me.


----------



## ryan8886 (Sep 19, 2006)

JSIsabella said:


> I also placed it as far away from my speaker as possible. The thought of a hard disk next to a big magnet in the speaker box did not seem like the smartest idea to me.


If you have quality speakers that are properly shielded, that should not be a problem.


----------



## DanoP (Sep 29, 2006)

I've got the garden variety WD 750gig edition (which I think is now on sale at BB for only $180) and haven't had any problems to speak of. I leave it on all the time. It spins down while not in use and it is *extremely* quiet. Even when I stick my ears next to it while transferring data it is hard to distinguish if I'm hearing the WD or the 622 right next to it.

One nitpicky thing. Once or twice when I've attempted to move a program over I get the screen that says I need to authorize use of the HD. But I go back and try it again and all is fine. I don't know.....maybe the drive is asleep and the 622 doesn't see it before it wakes up.


----------



## David-A (Feb 21, 2006)

I've been using a 750GB WD My Book Essentials for a couple weeks now. The first one I bought wouldn't spin up. The second works pretty well. It is quiet. Sitting next to the 622, the only way I can tell it is spinning is to put my hand on it. Unlike some external drives that run hot, this one is only warm to the touch.

However, there have been several times when a program paused for a few seconds either when watching programs I transfered to the EHD or when watching a recording from the internal drive while transfering programs to the EHD. I've not seen this behavior before installing the EHD. Whether this is an issue with the WD My Book, with Dish's implementation of the EHD, or completely unrelated, I don't know.


----------



## DaddyDuke (Aug 30, 2006)

Is anyone having problems with their EHD on the 722 or is this just a 622 issue?
Duke


----------



## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

Since there is a lot more 622s than 722 in the field, you are going to have a much smaller sample so one would expect less reports or given such a small sample size no reports. Also, there are some reports where uses with drives seem to indicate they have the problem on one box with a certain bootstrap level and not on another so it is possible all 722s have a different bootstrap level so they may not exhibit the issue. 

Moral of the Story: if you are reporting an issue. Please include your bootstrap level and if you have a 622 or 722.


----------



## RLMesq (Mar 9, 2003)

I bought a 320 gig MyBook essential at Best Buy (on sale for $89.95, so I went for cheap over larger storage) and all seems to be working fine. I haven't noticed the noise others have complained about; are noise levels only an issue with higher-capacity drives?

I've only noticed one snag: my large initial transfer (over a hundred gigs), which the display indicated would take several hours, was apparently interrupted during the nightly guide download.


----------



## b5lurker (Aug 14, 2002)

DaddyDuke said:


> Is anyone having problems with their EHD on the 722 or is this just a 622 issue?
> Duke


I have a WD 500GB MyBook PremiumES Edition hooked up to my 722 and another one hooked up to my 622 and have had no problems transferring or viewing content with either receiver.


----------



## guillermopelotas (Oct 9, 2006)

b5lurker said:


> I have a WD 500GB MyBook PremiumES Edition hooked up to my 722 and another one hooked up to my 622 and have had no problems transferring or viewing content with either receiver.


I've got a 500GB MyBook Essentials, and it's working well for the 3 weeks I've been using it!!!!


----------



## Galaxie6411 (Aug 26, 2007)

I just got my 750GB Mybook in today and am currently transferring files over while recording on both tuners and watching a recorded event. I noticed some slight hesitation right after the reboot but it quickly went away. I've also checked in on the transfer and did not have a problem. It also is nearly silent running. I also never connected to anything other than the 622.

VIP622 with Mybook Essential WD7500C032-002

One note if you are recording when you format the external HD it will reboot and kill the recording, but will start it again when it comes back on. Also the estimated time seems to be plenty high it started out at 9+ hours and when I checked it half an hour later it was down to 7+.


----------



## bobukcat (Dec 20, 2005)

I had turned off my 750GB My Book Premium Edition for several days because the 622 was unusable with it on. I turned it back on Wednesday evening and haven't had any issues for two days now. There are no longer any aqcuiring signal or downloading guide lockups and so far (knock on wood) no spontaneous reboots. I assumed I must have gotten a s/w upgrade to fix it but I'm still running on L4.41. It appears to have just fixed itself after having the drive turned off for a couple of days. So far, so good....


----------



## pmsmith66 (Feb 13, 2003)

My 500GB My Book has performed perfectly and is also quiet. As an FYI...slickdeals.net has a good deal from Staples for this 500GB drive right now. It's $110 shipped but if you read the thread, there are several ways to get the price down in the $90 range delivered. Excellent deal for an excellent drive.


----------



## gweempose (Jun 11, 2006)

I have the 750GB My Book Premium Edition hooked up to my 622, and I am experiencing the same problems as the OP. It will often get stuck while downloading the guide data, it locks up on the aquiring signal screen, and it just basically acts very flaky. I find that I can usually get everything to work properly after messing around a bit and watching some live TV. Once I "fix" it, everything appears to work just fine. It's pretty annoying though, so I think I'm going to return the My Book to Best Buy and go with a different drive. What do people feel is the most reliable drive to use at this point?


----------



## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

gweempose,

Check this thread out and if you look at the stick user tips and tricks at the top I have a list of EHD threads to take a look at to try an narrow down your choices.

http://www.dbstalk.com/showthread.php?t=95896


----------



## Spike375 (Dec 4, 2005)

Ron Barry said:


> Since there is a lot more 622s than 722 in the field, you are going to have a much smaller sample so one would expect less reports or given such a small sample size no reports. Also, there are some reports where uses with drives seem to indicate they have the problem on one box with a certain bootstrap level and not on another so it is possible all 722s have a different bootstrap level so they may not exhibit the issue.
> 
> Moral of the Story: if you are reporting an issue. Please include your bootstrap level and if you have a 622 or 722.


Where do you find the bootstrap level? I'm using a 622 with L4.41.


----------



## Ron Barry (Dec 10, 2002)

menu-menu


----------



## pmreed (Jan 28, 2005)

I replaced my problem prone Seagate 500 gig FreeAgent with a WD 750 gig My Book Essential I picked up at BB. It's behaved flawlessly since installation 5 days ago.


----------



## Spike375 (Dec 4, 2005)

Ok, I just checked and the bootstrap version on my 622 is 1710RBDD. It hasn't frozen since my last post. I suppose it doesn't happen often enough to be a big problem but it is getting a little annoying because when I go to transfer something I don't know if it will actually complete or freeze and then have to do a power button reset. It's frozen 6 times total so far, but I have made a LOT of transfers.


----------



## SingleAction (Apr 29, 2005)

b5lurker said:


> I have a WD 500GB MyBook PremiumES Edition hooked up to my 722 and another one hooked up to my 622 and have had no problems transferring or viewing content with either receiver.


I installed this drive this morning, without a hitch!

It works great so far, transfered about 60 gb which is about 15 1- hour shows, but it takes some time.


----------



## Galaxie6411 (Aug 26, 2007)

I still get the message to call dish and activate mine most of the time when I go to use it but if you just cancel and access a second time it works fine, I am still running V4.41 FWIW. Other than that I have moved over 200gb's to it, watched a few movies off the HD and deleted some stuff off the HD all without a problem. There is a slight delay when working with it but nothing major.


----------



## plainsman (Nov 16, 2006)

the poblem:

Audio dropouts playing back directly from a 500Gb essentials disk ... 
and a question - is there any penalty/problem w/ moving a program back/forth to the main 622 hard drive or does dish limit that?

the details:
firmware 4.43,
program: channel 9425 (or 9424) -- ESPN or ESPN2 HD, poker program, 4+ Gb / hour so I infer MPEG2 compression.

during playback, and after skip-forward and -back to get through commercials the audio would skip/drop-out ... my receiver would briefly lose audio and then have to re-sync and go back into DD5.1 [optical connection] ...

I'm guessing a small # of frames is being dropped and then the problem is made worse by my receiver [sony STR-v444es] taking its sweet time to reconnect/sync/whatever. there may or may not have been any video skip accompanying ...

if I stopped the playback and resumed then the problem disappeared until the next time I skipped a commercial. for this type of data stream, is it pushing USB to its limits and under-running intermittently?

at its worst there was a dropout every second or so. pretty annoying.
ideas anyone ?

or do I give up playing back from the USB drive ??


----------



## bobukcat (Dec 20, 2005)

bobukcat said:


> I had turned off my 750GB My Book Premium Edition for several days because the 622 was unusable with it on. I turned it back on Wednesday evening and haven't had any issues for two days now. There are no longer any aqcuiring signal or downloading guide lockups and so far (knock on wood) no spontaneous reboots. I assumed I must have gotten a s/w upgrade to fix it but I'm still running on L4.41. It appears to have just fixed itself after having the drive turned off for a couple of days. So far, so good....


Unfortunately my luck ran out, after about a week of no problems with the EHD connected it went back to sticking at the Acquiring Satellite Signal or Dowloading Guide data screens. I'm still running L4.41.


----------



## AVJohnnie (Jul 27, 2004)

secretservices said:


> I have the WD MyBook 500GB Premium, and its seems to be working fine. What are the problems with this model?
> The only issue I can think of is when I go to access it....it gives me the You need to Activate screen....but it then wakes up and works just fine.


And in my case, this minor annoyance was corrected by the L4.43 update.


----------



## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

On a related note... Did anyone else notice that sometime in the past week Best Buy has removed all of the larger (500GB, 750GB, 1TB) Western Digital MyBook drives from their Web site?

I haven't been into a store since last weekend to see if they have them on the shelves... but a search for WD external drives on the Best Buy Web site now only brings up 4 different models, and the 320GB is the only MyBook they have.

I wonder what happened.


----------



## bobukcat (Dec 20, 2005)

HDMe said:


> On a related note... Did anyone else notice that sometime in the past week Best Buy has removed all of the larger (500GB, 750GB, 1TB) Western Digital MyBook drives from their Web site?
> 
> I haven't been into a store since last weekend to see if they have them on the shelves... but a search for WD external drives on the Best Buy Web site now only brings up 4 different models, and the 320GB is the only MyBook they have.
> 
> I wonder what happened.


Strange, CC and other retailers still have them on their sites, maybe all us 622/722 owners bought them out and they have to re-stock. :sure:


----------



## phrelin (Jan 18, 2007)

WD My Book Essentials 750GB with a 722 easy to set up and works great so far. Was $199.99 at Amazon for a day. It looks like it will hold nearly 100 HD movies. At $2 a movie it seems like a buy if Dish (or AT&T if that comes about) will continue to support it. Since the drive has to be reformatted for a non-Windows operating system, why buy the Premium Edition?


----------



## HD_Wayne (May 23, 2006)

twindaddy said:


> This is slightly off topic, but I think readers considering a WD MyBook should be aware. I've bought and returned two of these drives because they are noisy (loud fan sound). I posted this on another thread and most people responded that I must have gotten a bad drive and there's was extremely quiet. I don't think I got two bad drives with identical noise issues. Perhaps, many people won't be bothered by the noise. Noise is very subjective after all. But, if you're an audiophile like me and you want to avoid any extra noise to your system, you should think twice before getting one of these drives.
> 
> How loud is loud? Well, from ten feet away on my couch I can hear the WD book OVER the 622. It's especially obvious when I turn *off* the WD and hear the delta. In comparison, my Seagate Freeagent drive (despite problems after waking up -- see that thread for the details) is not audible from 1 foot away.


I have 2 1TB drives and when the fan runs it is noisy also. Fortunately it only runs if I am doing a lot of transfers and after a while presumably when the drives are cool the fan stops and all is quiet. Note that the 722 does not support a 1TB configuration from what E* tells me. I only mention this here to relate to the fan noise issue.


----------



## Leprechuan (Apr 18, 2007)

Finally worked my budget out and was able to go to Best Buy today and got the WD MyBook Essentials 320 GB external hard drive and hooked it up.

I started with a test transfer just to be on the safe side.
It worked out fine and now in the process of transferring the DeLaHoya vs. Mayweather fight from May 5th to the external drive.

I still think the fight was a draw.

I didn't ming paying the $39.00 fee either, but that was a one time only fee.

I'm glad to have more room on he DVR to more HD shows.


----------



## Allen_WA (Sep 17, 2007)

I also have the W/D MyBook 500GB Premium Edition. I have a 722 and have no problems with transfers but my external drive will not sleep if left running. Also if I leave the drive running there appears to be random problems with the receiver, but they may not be related. Since the drive won't sleep it's easier to turn it off then make my wife mad by experimenting.  I have one of these drives hooked up to my computer and have had no problems.


----------



## bobukcat (Dec 20, 2005)

phrelin said:


> WD My Book Essentials 750GB with a 722 easy to set up and works great so far. Was $199.99 at Amazon for a day. It looks like it will hold nearly 100 HD movies. At $2 a movie it seems like a buy if Dish (or AT&T if that comes about) will continue to support it. Since the drive has to be reformatted for a non-Windows operating system, why buy the Premium Edition?


I only bought the premium edition because it was on sale for $70 less than the essentials edition, unfortunately I was one of the first to notice it doesn't work right with the 622 after about a week or so. I now just turn it off manually when I'm not using it and turn it back on when I do need it. It's not perfect but I'll deal with it for now.


----------

