 Compact, sleek and works great |
| Review Date: May 16, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Nuknuk, Springfield, VA United States |
Works with my PCs and Macbook. (Make sure you are using the correct USB plug on your Mac laptop. Not all of the USB outlets in Mac laptops have sufficient power to drive an external drive. Read the manual to find which is which).
No review for the included software. Since most of my experience with softwares that comes with products like camera, external drives are rarely satisfactory, software was not installed in the first place.
Pros:
- Lowest price I found for a 2.5" external drive
- No need for a power brick. It is powered by the USB 2.
- So quiet, Just like an Ipod.
- Small enough to fit in your pocket. 0.59" (H) x 5" (L) x 3" (W)
- Comes with the USB cable
Cons:
- Shiny Black finish is easy to scratch
- No case included
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Nice drive
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| Review Date: May 22, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Vladimir Kushnir, Darien, CT United States |
| I have this drive for about half-a year now. It is recognized both by Windows XP and Mac OS X (Leopard). I did not use any software to do backups, just grab the files myself and drag them to the drive, or use a script (.bat file). Operation is exceptionally simple: you connect it - it is recognized by the computer, you use it, and then use disconnect/eject command (I am guilty of not always doing this, but no problems so far) and disconnect it. The drive comes in a soft case, does not have and require any power supply, works via USB cable, and no problems whatsoever so far. I am thinking about buying another one, maybe slightly bigger (there is a 320G version). |
Very impressive Drive!
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| Review Date: October 23, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Mike Voss, |
Quick summery, Works as advertised, easy to format to ntfs usable drive space on 500 is 465 the same as the previous My Book, it needs no external (additional power). The heat generated is not really noticeable at all.
potential negative: little white flashing light, there is no more disc noise than an IPOD. The only warning I would give is the lack of a case, it really needs protection and should (in my opinion) only be transported or even stored in a case. However this can't be held against the drive as far as its performance.
A little more commentary on reliability, and Price value.
I have purchased half a dozen passport drives in the last 90 days all but one are 320. So as a measure of reliability all of these drives have so far worked very well. They have not become louder or slower they are like they were in the beginning. I use some as dedicated backups and some for consolidation and centralization. As far as durability I have taken one with me on a few trips the first one I acquired. It functions without any noticeable difference as well.
Commentary about Price difference to follow.
No drive is 100% reliable few are in the high 90's for that long. This is of course my opinion, but when compared to the prior My Book 500 GB models of which a few each with power supplies etc. It is so great to not have to deal with big heavy drives with power supplies. When comparing that difference I believe this is certainly worth the price.
A final word on the drive. Not in recent memory have I seen the price for something like the passport drives be so different (in percent) due to color. If there is any difference in any of the WD passport models in color or stainless steel etc please let me know. If it is just aesthetics then as far as I am concerned who cares. Buy the color of your choice but if you are choosing based on price make sure to be aware that color or metal instead of plastic can make a huge difference. In the case of the 320 and 250 passport there seemed to be not just a very big price difference, often 15-35 percent, and this price would change based upon new models etc.
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Excellent value for the money and portable to boot
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| Review Date: September 15, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Jerry Saperstein, Evanston, IL USA |
For the price, you can't beat the capacity and portability of these Western Digital My Passport Essential Portable Hard Drives.
Western Digital has a long history of producing dependable drives.ss
The housings are well designed and, with a bit of care, you can dissemble them should the need or desire arise. The drives themselves are workhorses. They are not the fastest, but they are more than adequate for most purposes.
I generally don't comment on other reviews of the same product, but there seem to be a number of misconceptions about this product thst should be clarified.
First, these portable hard drives are for usse only with USB 2.0 ports. Period. Machines three years old and older may not have USB 2.0 ports.
Second, hard drives are electro-mechanical devices. Hard drives do fail unexpectedly whether they are a day or year or more old. Hard drive failure is not predictable. So it you plan on using this or any hard drive to back up your precious family photos, financial records or doctoral thesis, make sure you have a second or third backup!
A couple of minor criticisms of the product. The supplied USB cable is on the short side. On the other hand, how long a cable do you need with a portable drive? In any event, USB cables are readily available and relatively inexpensive. A bigger and more important criticism is that Western Digital does not provide a cable with a second USB connector for use on those computers where a single USB port doesn't provide enough power. Finally, WD doesn't include a carrying case. Small things, to be sure, that wouldn't cost Western Digital a lot of money to include, but they don't.
You won't find any competent network administrator who doesn't have multiple backups and the reason for this is that hard drives do fail!
So if you entrust your valuable data to a single hard drive, you are making a big mistake. Always have at least two and preferably three backups that you update frequently. And don't assume that your backups are reliable. Test recovering data from them from time to time.
You might be able to recover some or all the data from a failed hard drive, but it can be a very expensive or troublesome process.
Just remember: if it's worth backing up, it's worth backing up at least twice. That's what the IT pros do - and it's what you should do with your valuable data as well.
Sorry for the digression, but I just wanted to correct the misimpressions that some people have left about these drives.
The Western Digital My Passport Essentials are solid, inexpensive, portable and very useful hard drives.
Jerry |
Very easy to use with Mac
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| Review Date: June 13, 2008 |
| Reviewer: S. Menon, Jersey City, NJ |
I bought this hard drive for Media Storage (Mac + Win) and also as a backup disc for Time Machine. The good news is that it comes in FAT32 format, which OS X can read/write. The bad news is that Time Machine requires the backup disc to be in HFS+ format (FAT32 or NTFS won't work).
However, this is easy enough to fix. I launched Disk Utility in OS X and partitioned the drive into 240 GB as FAT32 (or as MS-DOS format, as Disk Util calls it), and 80 GB as HFS+. Took less than 5 minutes for the whole thing. So now, I've got one partition for time machine, and another for my media.
Fine Print :
1. In partitioning the drive, it formats the drive first. So any free utils that come with the hard disk are erased. Not an issue for me as I didn't intend to use any of the free software. But anyone trying this should be aware of it.
2. For anyone thinking about doing the same thing, note that FAT32 does allow both Windows and OSX to read/write without the need for a 3rd party software. But the downside of FAT32 is that it doesn't allow a file size larger than 4 GB. This isn't an issue for me (I don't expect to come across many files that are larger than 4 GB each). To avoid this issue, you could create one partition in NTFS (instead of FAT32). Once you do this, you'll need a 3rd party software so that OS X can read and write to the NTFS partition. I've heard good things about MacFuse (though I haven't tried it myself).
Other thoughts...
- Nice and compact
- Fairly silent
- Pretty short USB cable (can be irritating for some. I prefer this to having a long cable dangling around).
- Wish it came with a soft case/cover (that's what I'm looking to pick up next). |
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