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Western Digital My Book Essential USB portable hard disc drive

It is neat, to be sure; having whole libraries worth of stuff stored in a black box that you can carry around. This has come a long way since the shareware invention of the Portable Hard Disc Drive. As time goes on these portable data storage devices get bigger in capacity, yet they remain physically a reasonable size.

This particular drive shown is the Western Digital My Book Essential Edition, a 320Gb drive, which someone astutely pointed out at the time was bigger than the sum total of the five hard disc drives in the computer underneath.

I was especially pleased to receive this 320Gb external drive by Western Digital as it was a special gift from Xytron Data Recovery the affordable data rescue and recovery company, along with a Trust UPS, in expectation of a nice dedicated affiliate page here at this site, which they have now got. See Xytron Data Recovery

The Western Digital company are likely to be making drives that are so-many terabytes, and they'll probably still run on a tiny power supply and plug into a USB connector.

The Western Digital MyBook Essential USB drive comes complete with software by Google, and whereas some people like both types of music - Country AND Western, the drive is said to work on both types of computer: the PC with Microsoft Windows and the Apple Mac! However on plugging it into a machine with Linux, it seems to worth with no problem, so I don't know why they don't say more about it on the box! (The inbuilt software doesn't get in the way in Linux, so you might as well leave it on the drive as there is plenty of space!).

Another interesting thing about The Western Digital MyBook Essential USB drive is that the stylish black case which has an artistic hint at 2001 a Space Odyssey (in the same sort of way that in the background on this picture you can see a tribute to Salvador Dali) has more to its ventilation airways than immediately meets the eye. They are neither regular nor random, but on close inspection are a digital message in a code going back to the earliest digital data transmissions: Morse Code! The message reads:

PERSONAL RELIABLE INNOVATIVE SIMPLE INNOVATIVE PERSONAL DESIGN RELIABLE INNOVATIVE DESIGN PERSONAL DESIGN SIMPLE INNOVATIVE SIMPLE RELIABLE DESIG ...which is quite poetical, especially as the message runs out of data space at almost 17 words / 145 bytes in Morse code* in data vents, giving a mere suggestion at the data space within the drive of over two thousand million times that amount!

The message is quite clear and meaningful, and the intended direction is obvious. But as with an Egyptian hieroglyphic message that has a creature with a face looking towards the beginning of the line, the message in Morse might conceivable have had a C,J, or Z in it, indicating the direction. However it doesn't have, which means we can play it backwards to see if anything else is revealed: ... WISEU EFVNIFER EFPMIS EBITNBOAAI EFPMIS AWISEU FNAOSREP AWISEU EBITNBOAAI EFVNIFER AWISEU FNAOSREP EBITNBOAAI EFPMIS EBITNBOAAI EFVNIFER FNAOSREP ... oh well it was worth a try! Actually I think they've done quite well to align the codes so the vents all matched a DASH at the corners of the case!

Of course if we're going to look for prophesy in hidden messages, we need look no further than the suggestion on the box: "My Book". Yes, you can write a book, and if you're wondering if it'll fit on the drive, the answer is yes, three hundred thousand times over.

If you would like to buy a Western Digital USB 2 portable hard disc drive like this, there are a few Computer Parts places who might have these things in stock.

Works on 110 volts or 240 volts equally well and uses a standard figure-8 connector on the power supply unit (PSU). Comes with a mains cable and plug. The drive itself works on 12 volts DC, but if you want to run it off a car battery you should use an inline fuse and some commonsense about charging-up procedures.

To get your own snazzy hard disc drive see Computer Suppliers (International Feature)

The Western Digital motto "Put Your Life On It" may refer to the idea that the drive is so big that you can store a lifetime's worth of writings, music, book material, etc on the drive, or it could be that the drive is so reliable that you can trust it with your life's data, or your life!

Admittedly these drives are pretty reliable, but nothing is 100%, and if you are really going to Put Your Life On It, it's reassuring to know there's such a company as Xytron Data Recovery !!

* Morse Code? Maybe I should write some stuff about Morse code, and reversed Morse code?!