Western Digital My Book Premium 500GB USB/FW 400 Ext Hard Drive
No problem sharing on network
I'm rating this 4 stars because I've only started using this drive (but so far I've saved to it Windows system backups for two computers and transferred a total of 55 GB to it). I haven't had any problems. I can't compare it with any other external drives and can't compare its speed with anything else (but both backups were done simultaneously, the 2nd over a wireless connection, while files were also being transferred).<br /><br />Mainly I wanted to give a different point of view to an earlier review, even though I bought a slightly different model, My Book Essential Edition, which has no software and is limited to a USB connection only (on sale at Best Buy for $200). Someone indicated a problem sharing the drive over the network and attributed this to a Western Digital constraint. This may depend on the type of connection. The comment almost kept me from buying this drive, because I want to be able to access it from my notebook as well as from my desktop, but I don't think the particular brand of a drive can limit standard USB connectivity. Anyway, I don't have any problem sharing the drive over my home network. I'm using Windows XP. (I reformatted the drive from a FAT drive to an NTFS drive to enable larger file sizes, etc., but that has no effect on the ability to share a USB drive.)