Apparently, the Western Digital MyBook line of external USB/Firewire hard drives have their share of problems. Fortunately, I haven’t had (knock on linoleum) the sorts of hardware failures that many have reported.

However, when using the MyBook via 4-pin firewire attached to my smoking Dell XPS Notebook, I have intermittently experienced complete lockups as the Plug and Play driver kicks in and craps out. It hasn’t helped installing the WD Drivers that are highly suspect, so in fact I uninstalled everything on my computer that smacked of “Western” or “Digital” (well, sort of) using Add/Remove Programs.

One trick that appears to be working is quite simple: don’t plug the power into the hard drive until AFTER you have plugged the firewire cable into the computer. Could be blatant superstition, but so far, so good. Okay, to be honest, I’ve only tried it the one time but that time it worked!!

Anyway, just a tip. Try it out if you’re experiencing troubles. Let me know how it turns out. Then buy Seagate.