Home > Consumer Reviews > Western Digital WDXC2000BBRNN 200GB FireWire/USB 2.0 Combo drive

Using USB 2.0 and XP, required no set up. As soon as I plugged it in XP could see it. Pretty quiet. Takes about 2 hours to backup 40 gigs including readback data checking.

I bought mine in December 2002 and use it once or twice a week, mostly for backups. I'm concerned reading the negative reviews above, but I've had no problems so far (as of June 2004). I am, however, thinking of buying another drive to serve as a backup for the backup. My take is that any one of these kinds of drives can fail, and when they do people get very upset and post their (valid) complaints, but that people who have no problems remain silent.

In January, 2003, I bought a Western Digital 200GB Firewire Hard Drive. It crashed in May, 2003. Western Digital replaced it under warranty. The replacement drive crashed in March, 2004. Western Digital will not replace it and they will not repair it, not even at my expense, though they say they are very sorry that I have had such bad luck with their drives. I'm touched by this sentiment, of course, but it is my feeling that Western Digital should either build better quality drives or back them with better service or, maybe, keep building the same drives but market them as Expensive Disposable Drives.

I've had this drive for over a year now, and it's still working fine with Windows XP.

Here are some random comments about the drive:

1) Despite the fact that USB2 is mathematically faster, in reality, at least with this drive, I've found firewire to be about 35% faster in data rates.

2) The drive gets rather hot... I'm not sure if all the drives are like that, or just mine, as mine still works regardless, but I thought it'd be worth mentioning.

3) You simply plug it in, and that's it. Hell, you can even install Windows XP on it even while it's plugged in externally.

All in all, there's not much I can really say about the drive. It works as advertised, is fast, is a nice 200GB of extra storage, I've had it over a year, it hasn't crashed, and I'm happy. In fact I've never had a Western Digital drive fail on me, the other drive that's ever failed on me was an IBM Deskstar. I even had an old 13GB Western Digital drive that would click a lot as if it WERE damaged, but lasted three years, and then I gave it to a friend who I think still uses it as a small drive for music.

I bought this drive 5 months ago, and used it for video backups from my iMac. It worked perfectly until I accidentally hit the plug with my foot and powered it down - it wasn't in the process of doing anything at the time, but that was enough for it to stop working, and start the dreadful clickling and clacking of doom. Luckily western digital has a good warranty, and they sent me a replacement drive.
The rainy season was opon us here in southern california recently, and we had one 2 minute power outage, and my replacement drive once again went kablooie, clicking and clacking, making me want to beat it with a two by four until it followed orders, but all was in vain, and here on my desk sits a shiny brand new western digital replacment. Anyone want to buy a brand new drive? I'll go buy a maxtor or something else, anything else. 3 drives later it still sucks, don't buy this.