Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 3.0/2.0 Portable External Hard Drive (Midnight Black)
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- Dual USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 compatibility
- Connectivity today; speed tomorrow
- Up to 3x faster transfer rates with USB 3.0
- Automatic, continuous backup
- Hardware encryption, password protection
- Dual USB 30 and USB 20 compatibility
- Up to 3x faster transfer rates with USB 30
Put your digital life on the stylishly small my passport essential portable hard drive. with wd quality and usb 3.0 and usb 2.0 connectivity, this drive is designed for today with tomorrow in mind. visual backup software and password protection with hardware encryption ensure your data is protected. lightweight and easy to carry, this drive is ideal for fast storage to go.
Wd Hard Drive
Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 3.0/2.0 Portable External Hard Drive (Midnight Black)
List Price: $ 129.99
Price:
Small, fast, high-capacity drive,
It was time to create fresh backup of my laptop, so I got this blue, 500GB WD drive because it was one of the cheapest and I know the manufacturer (used their products before).
The drive is definitely the smallest 2.5 inch portable drive I have ever seen personally. It was the first USB 3.0 device I have purchased, so discovering new, wider USB 3.0 connector on the drive side was a surprise to me. Please note that that the larger plug on the cable (the one you insert into the computer) is also USB 3.0, but fortunately it fits into any USB socket. If your computer does not have USB 3.0 hardware, you can use regular ‘micro-USB’ cable to connect: just plug it into the wider of the two sections of the socket in the drive.
First backup with the drive was successful, but lengthy as usual. I’m going to buy USB 3.0 express card for my laptop to speed up the process in the future.
One note about the software that comes with the drive – it is horrible! While my hardware experience with WD drives was OK in the past, their software was always of questionable quality. I decided to give it another try after 3 year break, but I had to uninstall and undo some damage manually pretty quickly. I have requested not to install backup part of the software (I’m using operating system facilities to backup), but the software installed ‘shadow copy’ and some other resident software on my machine anyway. Later on the software suggested firmware update, but could not detect the drive during update!. The worst offense was the change of drive letters on my machine: I have main hard drive with two partitions, DVD drive and flash drive – WD software stole D: letter drive from my DVD drive and turned it into G: drive. Of course uninstalling the software did not return the correct drive order, so I had to do it myself. Conclusion: DO NOT INSTALL THE SOFTWARE THAT COMES WITH THE DRIVE – only the driver that is required on Windows to avoid pop ups when the drive is connected.
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|Another Winner from Western Digital,
I recently received this Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBACY5000ABK-NESN (Midnight Black) from Amazon Vine and I am very pleased with it. It is the first USB 3.0-capable device I have owned. I am using this, and all of my other external hard drives, as storage units only (in other words, for backing up and storing my document files and folders, my music, my pictures, and my videos, not for backing up the computer itself). It is a nice large portable hard drive, as large or larger in capacity than most laptop computers. It requires no power other than that supplied by the USB port.
When it arrived I opened the box and retrieved the drive. Having done that, I gently shook the drive to make certain that nothing was loose inside. Then I physically examined it to make certain that the ports were properly fitted and aligned with the outer case. Everything was fine. At that point I inserted the supplied cable’s plug into the (new-type) miniature USB port on the drive and inserted the regular USB plug into my computer. Both ends fit easily and perfectly.
As I am using the Ubuntu Linux operating system on my computer, the drive opened instantly. I saw the usual WD backup programs, etc., which are of no use to me and which I immediately removed. (From what I have read, many people do not need or want WD’s backup programs. Fortunately, on this drive, they are easy to delete.) The drive now has 465.6 GiB of available space. (My system analyzer shows that 100 MB is being used for “something” but I don’t know what it is.) I copied some files onto the drive and they installed perfectly, just as they have done on my other external hard drives.
As is, it will work perfectly with Microsoft Windows systems and, with reformatting, it will work with Apple Mac systems.
This particular external drive is quite nice – small, well-made, and convenient to use. I cannot comment on the speed of USB 3.0 transfers as I don’t have anything which has USB 3.0 as yet. When it becomes standard on notebook or netbook computers, I’ll buy one of those; I am looking forward to faster transfer speeds. From the examples of file transfer given on the outer box, the speed differential does not appear to be as fast as I had been led to believe from articles in magazines and on the internet. But any speed increase will be welcome.
Of course, like all USB drives, it is fully compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 (though I do not know the power arrangements with USB 1.1).
The only point on which I cannot comment definitively in this review is that of longevity. I will have had to own it for several years before I can say anything truly useful about that! But all of my other Western Digital hard drives have worked perfectly from Day One and all continue to work perfectly.
I hope this information may be of some interest to anyone who wishes to purchase this drive. I have to admit that I am somewhat prejudiced: I own a half-dozen or more Western Digital hard drives and I like them all very much. My oldest, a 40 GB (which was considered HUGE at the time I bought it, perhaps 6 or 7 years ago) is still in regular use as are all the others. As I said, all of them have held up beautifully so I should expect that this one will too.
In my opinion, if you are currently in the market for a larger portable hard drive, this is the one to buy as it will be usable with all versions of USB for the foreseeable future. I highly recommend it.
I also strongly recommend that you buy more than one external hard drive (preferably this one as it has a large capacity and is USB 3.0-capable) on which you save your information (redundancy). Should your computer’s hard drive or even (or also) ONE of these drives be damaged or corrupted in some way, you will still have your data. That’s what I do. It’s cheap insurance! The chances of losing your computer’s hard drive and TWO external hard drives should be quite low. (I think that there is a greater chance of your computer’s hard drive to fail than there is of one of these externals to do so.)
Thank you for reading and considering my opinions.
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Update: October 20, 2010
I REALLY like this hard drive. How much? Well, I just bought four (4) more of them – three from J&R Music & Computer World via Amazon (J&R is one of their ‘partners’), two black ones and one blue one, and one through J&R itself (a red one, which Amazon has not been stocking).
The three I purchased through Amazon arrived yesterday; I’m still waiting for J&R’s shipment. The ones…
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|Very solid entry for Western Digital,
While USB 3.0 devices are slow to trickle out into the mainstream, Western Digital has released this 500GB USB 3.0 (USB 2.0 compatible) drive that works just as you’d expect it to.
Transfer speeds are what you’d expect over USB 2.0 (i.e. average), and the drive is very quiet. I suspect it’s a 5400rpm drive inside…
Some things to note:
1.) The device itself is pretty small. Very, very portable.
2.) It has a plastic coating that scratches very easily, sadly.
3.) I don’t see an easy way to open the casing to put in a larger drive in the future…
4.) The USB 3.0 cable is different from your normal USB 2.0 cable, but for USB 2.0 use you can use a standard MicroUSB cable, and I tested this to work perfectly. USB 3.0 is MicroUSB + an additional port next to it for USB 3.0 speeds, but you can just use the MicroUSB part for older systems!
Overall, this worked great on my 2009 i7 iMac formatted in HFS, and on Windows 7 formatted as NTFS. No issues with either.
It’s a very solid drive so far, the price is reasonable for this new USB 3.0 technology, and I can’t find any reasons not to give it 5 out of 5!
So…. 5 stars out of 5!
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