
After having purchased many external HD drive of varying sizes in the past, the 1TB Western Digital 'My Book' has proven to be the most reliable, quiet and sleek units I have purchased so far.
The drive comes formatted as FAT32, so before you do anything else, I would recommend reformatting the drive as NTFS if you are intending to store large images, video or your music collection on it. With the drive being 1TB, you'll need to leave quite a while for the reformat to take place (mine was still going through the process 2 hours after kicking it off). If you are intending to connect it directly to your xbox360, you'll need to leave it formatted as FAT32 as the xbox can't read NTFS file systems (apparently).
The casing looks pretty cool and doesn't give off anywhere near as much heat as my other external HD's I've purchased in the past. There is no fan fitted so the drive is quiet while it's sitting dormant.
The drive powers up and down with your PC,so you can leave it connected all the time. There is no power switch on the unit itself.
If you are not accessing or writing files to the drive, the unit will go dormant to save on power. It normally takes a few seconds for the drive to spin up. This can be quite frustrating at times, but certainly no different from experiences with other external HD's.
With the recent price drop on 1TB units and 1.5TB units becoming available, now is a good time to pick up a great deal. Get more detail about
Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive.