I would stay clear of all things WD at this point. The mynet9000 I got from Woot is horrendous and the support forums pretty much stated ‘we are no longer supporting this process, but you can collect your tears and ship them to us and we will reimburse the shipping cost’.
My WD passport 1TB drive is also garbage. It doesn’t make a strong connection with the cable so the hard drive constantly disconnects. I actually have a hair band wrapped around it a couple times to keep the cable tight so I can use it. Just steer clear of WD. It’s not Western Digital is Worst Digital.
Can these be used to store music and movie files to play through a USB on a smart television that has a USB port to view videos and such? Kind of like I do with a flash drive through my Xbox one or a BluRay player that has a USB port?
You should have done some research before buying the MyNet device. WD was getting out of the router business, so that’s why all those devices ended up on the discount websites.
As to your portable drive, sounds like you did something to it. I have several portable WD drives, some are over 2 years old, now, and they still perform flawlessly.
Are these decent drives for Time Machine backups? My in-laws have Macs, and I want to get them doing backups. I remember hearing at some point, there were certain drives that worked better with Time Machine than others. This may be a myth. Anyone have any problems using these with Time Machine?
Yup. I bought a 750GB WD Elements that died; the woot page claimed there was a 90-day mfr warranty, but WD ain’t having none of that. I’m still waiting for my RMA number. Next time I need something as critical as a disk drive, I’ll buy a new one from a reputable dealer that honours advertised warranties.
I have five of the 1TB versions in rotation for weekday backup of critical office files using Symantec software. One drive is always off-site in case the place blows up, so they ride to and from home with me in a little WD hard shell case. They get about 500Gb written to them per cycle, so a full disk write every other week. Zero failures in two years (three? four? It goes by so fast…) . I’m not sure I’d bite on a refurb, but they are good little drives.
Remember when the deals were so good on here you’d buy on impulse just in case it’d sell out by the time you finished researching? Now it’s the opposite, by the time I research it I realize that I can get the same thing, brand new, and cheaper, elsewhere. Common Woot.
FWIW, If anyone wants to steer clear of the bundled, proprietary, sometimes-indistinguishable-from-bloatware backup utilities included with backup drives, the online backup service Crashplan has essentially a “free version” that will do scheduled, incremental backups to any local folder (i.e. a folder on a backup drive).
I currently subscribe to their online service, but I also have a separate (bulkier) backup set being backed-up to an external USB drive similar to the ones offered here, and it works well.