I'm considering buying Western Digital Mybook 500gb Essential Edition (WDG1U5000)
( http://westerndigital.com/en/products/Prod...asp?DriveID=232 )
I've been reading some user opinions and tech reviews and i've found some mixed results.
The vast majoraty of users are satisfied with the product and their con point is that the case is weak plastic looking (which could be very robust i don't know).
Only a few tech sites don't rate it high because of speed performance issues.
One other low is that the case cannot be open, so if the hdd fails i cannot reuse the case on other disks.
The use for it is archival and what i want the most is reliability and error-free operation.
I would like to know your guys opinions.

Some specs:

Performance Specifications



  Rotational Speed        7,200 RPM (nominal)



     Buffer Size     16 MB



   Average Latency 4.20 ms (nominal)



Seek Times



     Read Seek Time  8.9 ms



  Track-To-Track Seek Time        2.0 ms (average)



Serial Transfer Rate



    USB 2.0



 Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0)      480 Mbits/s (Max)