Large Capacity, Unlimited Frustration
931584
I originally bought this drive to use for storing large video files from family home movies.  I found that, unlike other external drives, Western Digital has taken it upon themselves to make installation as lengthy and frustrating as possible, with absolutely ZERO support.

First, you can't just plug in the FireWire and have the drive work.  In WinXP systems, you first have to plug in the USB cable and then have the drive autostart its own installation.  Well, OK, I can see that.  I did this for my laptop and it works fine.  Now, here is the big problem.  I wanted to transfer over a few hundred gigs of video files from my desktop's archive to the MyBook so I could edit them on my laptop...but when I plugged the USB 2.0 cable into my desktop, the drive DID NOT AUTORUN any installation software!  Windows searched in vain for an appropriate driver and then couldn't install it.  So I went to WD's support site and got the entire installation software package and manually installed all of them.  Then I restarted and plugged in the USB cable.

NOTHING HAPPENED.  The drive was unrecognizable.  I tried the FireWire next, after checking in Device Management that the controlling software was OK, which it was.  NOTHING.  After three hours of trying to get this drive to be seen, I quit and just went out and bought a simpler drive.  My&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Apricorn-250GB-EZ-BUS-DT-HI-SPEED-USB-2-EZ-BUS-DT-250/dp/B0001N9VWE/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Apricorn 250GB EZ BUS DT HI-SPEED USB 2 ( EZ-BUS-DT-250 )</a>&nbsp;works like a USB flash key in that it simply IDs itself as a disk drive and you can transfer files no swat.  THIS THING, though, has some other mode of operation that makes it impossible to use with anything other than the first system you install it on.

WD's support is zero and their knowledge base is uninformative.  I would never buy another MyBook again and I would recommend that others don't, as well, until WD increases the level and expertise of their tech support.
2709485
If you are looking for easy to use software then this is it if you have a state of the art computer with massive memory. Otherwise beware. And if you are looking for a package that has good customer support then this is not what you are looking for. It took hours and hours of pain and suffering to finally make this work. Unfortunately most of the good programs of this type are memory hogs and bad customer service. que sara
2680249
I paid for 1 TB, and 50 GB's of max capacity is missing. I understand that memory is always like that and is not perfect, but 50 entire GB's? That's quite a lot of memory.
3843750
Packing insanely big, I really cannot understand the purpose of such waste of space
2677356
Awesome except you get 460 gigs. Where do the other 40 gigs go? You lose more gigs than the older platter drives. Maybe Santa will visit the Island of Lost Gigs one day and find those gigs a home.
2828116
I bought this thinking I'd store my photos and videos on my home network.  However, for folders that are large, e.g. over a few GB, the ix2 takes way too long to even display the file folder structure let alone move data between hard drives.  I called and spent many hours with tech support. They were helpful and even sent out new drives to me but unfortunately, the speed remains unacceptably slow.  Just imaging waiting over 30 seconds just to the the file names displayed in a folder.  Furthermore, when I tried to enable the cloud features, the technician admitted that they advise deactivating these features since they have so many tech support calls and concluded that they are too problematic for most users.  So, bottom line, this product does not work as advertised.  Consider a different purchase.  I regret my purchase.
1404542
The NAS by itself works great, but I started having problems accesing it remotely, and contacted WD about it after making sure it was not a problem with the drives or firmware. After a month of back and forth of emails and many rescheduled calls they decided to close the ticket without actually solving the problem. WD has terrible customer support, the hardware is fine, but once you run into trouble you are on your own.
2014616
Black Friday special! Does it's job. Huge capacity.
3334764
Do yourself a favor. Stop into the Iomega support forums and see how many miserable there are out there, having lost photos, music, had to pay for EXPENSIVE data recovery - and now I'm going to get to do the same.

RUN!
610755
I too purchased this external drive due to the lure of it's large capacity and cheap price. I've been working in IT for the past 23 years, so I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing. Figured there couldn't be much of a difference between the name brands and this Cavalry (probably uses drives from the same manufacturer). It's a nice size, has a great aluminum case and a pretty blue LED light on the front.

BUT...unfortunately, the first drive I received could not handle a sustained copy of My Documents (~200GB). I've tried several different backup applications, including the one that I always successfully used with my Western Digital external (FolderClone), but the Cavalry 320 fails every time. The light changes from blue to red and it completely locks up my system, requiring a reboot to return it to service. I requested a replacement from Amazon last week. They cross-shipped a new drive to me extremely quickly (they really have this part of their operation fine tuned!). With great anticipation, I hooked up the new drive and it has the exact same problem. Seems to be fine when I'm just copying small quantities of individual files...but locks up when doing my nightly backup every single time (again, causing a hard freeze of my system).

I just checked to see what got copied last night before it died and mine appears to allow plenty of >100MB files, as it seems to have successfully copied several multi-GB video files without a problem. Maybe it is a overheating issue. Wish there was SMART functionality on this drive, so I could monitor and log the temp to see if this is the issue.

I'm still doing some more testing, but in the end I'll probably just return this one too and get a name-brand external for a few $$ more. I purchased this for backup and I really need to feel that it is truly reliable. I just don't have a good feeling about this Cavalry at all!
4209321
Crazy, man. Imagine: 32gb's on a card not much bigger than one's fingernail, and at a cost of about four packs of cancer-sticks (sorry, all you smokers). I remember when 'memory' went for $1,000 a MB, and corporations spent multi-thousands of greenbacks to store their precious data off-site in some air-conditioned computer-room with sound-pressure-levels hovering around 86db's (pushing the envelope, and not too concerned about their employee's hearing, either). Now, you can get insane amounts of storage for dirt-cheap prices, and Samsung stands at the head of the class, seemingly always upping the ante with top-drawer product. While non-volatile storage will still sometimes fail (make sure you eject, before you yank that little marvel of technology out of its slot!) at these prices, one's worries may be minimized. Still concerned? M-disc, podner...M-disc, and worry no more!
4787176
The first thing you think about huge external hard disks, is to utilize them for long life storage backup. We have reached a stage where typical user has GB of valuable data he does not want to lose. This is what I thought when I agreed to spend $280 in my case for the 300 GB drive. It was a recommendation from a friend who has very good experience about it, same as many others reviewing the item here.

Unfortunately, I am computer engineer who had had this drive for above 2 months now and have tried everything to get it to work with no luck. I only managed to get it working somehow on one of 3 PCs I tried on. The whole net forums could not help, and I could not get technical email contact for the company, only phone calls. International in my case, and I don't want to bare the cost of them.. Worse, the company Maxtor are celebrating christmas now so I have to wait before I can catch them.

What I can conclude from all reviews I read is that, there is a possibility you will get a healthy drive and live happily with it for a short period of time. Otherwise you are doomed and ripped off completely. So its a kind of gambling I am not welling to take again. Both cases, I can see that the drive that is supposed to be long term solution for backup is failing over in the time of one year ONLY!. Avergae normal PC life is much higher than this, so this is a transfer media more than a backup one. Also, my friend who recommended this had it crash because it felt of the table. Now I know this is his fault, but in this age, and for that price, we do expect some level of high vailability for a thing called backup.
3798052
I like the video quality and the large hard drive.  I have 4,707 songs on it, some music videos, a TV show,a movie, many pictures... and I still have 200 Gb left...

But be forewarned-- to really make it work you'll have to shell out additional bucks for plug-ins...  and it still can't play many video formats...  This aspect is really confusing...  It would be nice to have a list of the supported formats WITH the specs for that format...  but I haven't found it...

And the support is... shall I say it... even worse than the support on most products...  For 2 nights... I left a message... they were supposed to call back and never did...  on the third night I finally got through... but ended up finding the solution myself...

So enjoy... but be prepared to be frustrated, too.
4602854
The endless memory function doesn't work fine.
1929245
Speedy, large-storage for low cost, and low-profile.  What more could you ask?
3986454
It has huge capacity. It is slow on transfers of big files-period.

It comes exFat(32) which can handle files way over 4GBs.

This very moment I did a Quick Format to NTFS. And everything just fine.

TigerDirect might have a better price. Next time I'll check TigerDirect before an Amazon purchase.
2445335
Overall, Synology makes a great product and has great apps to support it.  That said, the amount of memory that comes on this unit is absolutely inexcusable.  In a day and age when memory is dirt cheap, to put just 1 GB on a device priced at this level, is a mistake.  I was hoping to use Crashplan to do backups direct from the device, but due to the limited amount of memory on the device, it can only back up a few GB.  I have to do my backups from a workstation on my network.  It would be one thing if it were upgradeable, but it's not.  Once you've bought it, you're stuck with it.  Also, the fact that it's designed to be a multimedia streaming device, but has terrible Plex support, is another big flaw.  Hopefully they rectify these flaws in a future model of this product.