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Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBABM0010BBK-NESN (Midnight Black)

By admin On December 28, 2009 Under Gadget Deals, New Gadget Reviews

User Reviews Send this to a friend
Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBABM0010BBK-NESN (Midnight Black)
 
Manufacturer: Western Digital
Customer Rating:
 
List Price: $199.99
Sale Price: $149.00
Availibility: Usually ships in 24 hours
Free Shipping Available
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Product Description

The world's most popular portable drive now features maximum capacity to store all your favorite videos, music, photos, and important files. Still sleek and compact, you can load it up and take it with you anywhere.

Maximum capacity.

Only a few milimiters thicker to accomodate our highest capacity mobile drives. Plenty of room for all your stuff.

See your life safe in one place.

WD SmartWare software - A visual control center with a single screen view of all your data. From it you can back up, retrieve, and secure your files.

Password protection.

An extra level of security with password protection and 256-bit hardware-based encryption.


Features at a glance
  • Automatic, continous backup
  • Visual backup control center
  • Hardware encryption, password protection
  • WD SmartWare software
  • 2-years limited warranty

Maximum capacity, maximum style - Store all your favorite videos, music, photos, and important files. Still sleek and compact, you can load it up and take it with you anywhere.

WD SmartWare™ - A control center for your drive that gives you the power to:

-- Protect your data automatically - Relax, your data is secure. Automatic, continuous backup will instantly make a second copy whenever you add or change a file.

-- See your backup as it happens - Seeing is believing. Visual backup displays your content in categories and shows the progress of your backup.

-- Bring back lost files effortlessly - Retrieve your valuable data to its original location whether you’ve lost all your data or just overwritten an important file.

-- Take control - Customize your backup, set drive security, run diagnostics, manage the power settings, and more from the WD SmartWare control center.

Find out more about WD SmartWare™

Drive lock - Gain peace of mind knowing that your data is protected from unauthorized access or theft with password protection and 256-bit hardware-based encryption.

Ready to plug-and-play with Windows PC's - if you're a Mac user, check out our Mac version of this product.

USB 2.0 interface - Powered directly from the USB port on your PC. No separate power supply is needed*.
* An optional cable is available for the few computers that limit power from the USB port.

Planet friendly - We designed a small box from recycled materials to minimize waste. We encourage you to recycle it.

Ideal For

  • Protecting your data with automatic, continous backup
  • Retrieving lost data effortlessly
  • Adding extra storage space for photos, videos and music
  • Securing private or sensitive data

Compatibility

Formatted NTFS
Windows® XP, Windows Vista®, Windows 7
Mac OS® X Tiger®, Leopard®, Snow Leopard™ (requires reformatting)

What's in the box

Ultra-portable hard drive, WD SmartWare software, USB cable, Quick Install Guide.


Backup software you'll really use � WD SmartWare

Five great reasons to love it:

1. It's easy - Data backup can be a chore, but it's your family photos, your movies, your music - your life - and it's important to protect it. So we made this software extra easy because we really want you to use it.

2. You can see your life safe in one place -
See your content displayed in easy to understand categories like movies and photos. Watch the progress of your backup as it happens with the instant-feedback color bars. Now you can truly be sure that all your stuff is backed up.

  • A unique visual interface lets you see the drives connected to your computer.
  • WD SmartWare will automatically scan your computer and find all of your personal files, including e-mail.
  • Content category gauges show how much information you have to be backed up in each category. You can even mouse over a category to see a file count.
  • Simply click Run Backup and WD SmartWare will automatically start backing up your files.
  • As your backup is running the category gauges will change color showing you the backup as it happens.
  • When finished, you’ll see a status screen and information about your backup. You only have to do this once. After the first backup your files will be backed up automatically every time you change or add a file.

3. It's always on the job - WD SmartWare is always watching your computer, so when you change a file and save it, create new files, add new pictures, movies, or songs, WD SmartWare will instantly back them up.

4. You can bring back lost files effortlessly - If you ever accidentally delete an important file, or need to get an earlier version of a file, you can find and retrieve it in seconds with this easy-to-use interface.

  • Restore files and folders by categories – photos, music, video, for example.
  • Find a lost file with the search function.
  • Go back in time to retrieve an older version of a file.

5. You're in control - WD SmartWare software is also a control center for your external drives. From it you can:

  • Customize your backup
  • Set drive security
  • Run diagnostics
  • Manage the power settings, and more...

Product Details

  • 1TB Maximun capacity in the palm of you hand
  • Automatic, continuous backup
  • Password protection and military-grade 256-bit hardware-based encryption
  • Ultra-portanble design
  • Powered directly from the USB port

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Customer Reviews

Smooth, Quiet, Fast... Better Than My Other Passports
 
Review Date: January 3, 2010
Reviewer: Sheldon Chang, Campbell, CA
First of all, the cable is fine and it's a lot better than the other cables that came with WD passports. The old USB cables did have a serious problem with jiggling loose and I could never use them on my laptop if there was any chance the laptop might move even a little for fear of disturbing the cable. I do not have that problem anymore with this passport.

The USB cable is a micro USB cable that is the same as on my BlackBerry 8900. Everyone crying about the "proprietary" cable... get a grip. It's not and it fits way more securely than the cable type it replaced.

I'm favorable to the software too. I want something hardware based that will password protect my drive because I use WD Passports exclusively as portable backup drives that are secondary backups in case of disaster. I own a bunch of them. This also means that I don't need to interact with the drive all that often so perhaps if I had to use this drive a dozen times a day and had to deal with the auto-mounting partition, it might get annoying, but it hardly seems like a big deal to me. I don't need the backup software on it so I can't comment on if that's any good at all but it's not getting in the way either. I use Apple's Time Machine programs to backup directly to this disk at least once a week and it has no conflicts with the permanent backup software on the drive.

As for the drive itself, all I can say is that it's so far so good. I've only had mine a few weeks. It's worked fine, it's fast, it's quiet, and it doesn't accidentally disconnect all the time like some of my older WD Passports. I normally wouldn't write a review so soon as the real test is if the drive is healthy after a few months of real use, but I just couldn't believe all the bellyaching going on here. Until further notice, I wish all of my WD Passports were like this version.
problems resolved
 
Review Date: January 7, 2010
Reviewer: Marco De Vivo, Miami, Florida United States
1) The cable is a 'standard male' to 'MICRO USB male'. The same one NOKIA uses as DATA cable for their cel phones to communicate with computers. Note that this is a MICRO (not a MINI)plug.
2) For the VCD you just follow the link shown at the beginning of this amazon page indicating news about the related software upgrade. Then choice your model and download the firmware utility and the vcd manager. Follow the quite long (24 steps) but otherwise easy procedures and remove the wired partition. you can use MAC or Windows software (both available) First make the firmware upgrade and then run the vcd manager and VOILA the extra icon disappears! My hard drivers came NTFS from FACTORY. I formatted MAC HFS (WITH GUID partitioning )with DISK UTILITY and THEN made the upgrades running the downloaded mac software. Mac owners ADVICE: try to stop spotlight (for the drive upgraded) while upgrading. Just to be on the safer side (even if not strictly mandatory I guess). Good luck. Excellent Hard Disks!.
Great drive
 
Review Date: January 14, 2010
Reviewer: D. Docherty,
It took me about ten minutes to deactivate the Western Digital software, using the download available from their site. It now simply works as a single drive under both Windows and Mac. I have owned this drive for several months and it has been a reliable performer. It is a very small form factor for 1 TB of storage. The USB cable works just fine, no problems at all. Way to go, Western Digital -- keep these excellent drives coming, and take a good hard look at giving us an option to buy a version without the software.
A great External Hard Drive, Looks Good Doing Its Job
 
Review Date: January 21, 2010
Reviewer: H. J. Spivack, North Woodmere, NY USA
I have had a series of external hard drives and let's face it, the only time it really fails expectations is when it fails to work. Chances are, unless it is really in bad shape, you will only notice speed issues when it is failing. I did however clock it (5400 RPM is what I saw online and I got a reading a little slower than that, but that could as easily be my computer as this drive's fault...still pretty danged quick IMHO) and the drive is fast in both reading and in writing. So, I decided to put my new Western Digital through its paces. If you read nothing else, know this: It worked well, I essentially have no complaints and plan on using the drive often. It is sexy looking, I'll give it that. What other hard drive do you know of that you can say that about? If that's all you're looking for, you can now close the window.

Still there? Ok, so let me tell you how I came to those conclusions.

The issues I saw online about faulty cables did not show up with my drive. It was a mini USB, plugged right in and off it went. The drive was immediately recognized and available for use. It tried to install a software GUI, a process which I immediately cancelled to reformat as a FAT32 to get it ready for testing. The

I setup the external hard drive and copied a variety of media to it, pictures, application, music, videos as IPOD and MP4 compatible files. The 'My Passport' was very fast and successfully wrote and read everything I threw at it. I hooked it up to my media center where it was recognized and I was able to watch both HD and nonHD video on my HD TV. The non-hd came through with artifacts (not surprisingly) and the HD had a few minor hiccups that could have been more about the connection than the drive.

All in all, a nice external hard drive which I've been using daily for several weeks!
They pack a wallop.
 
Review Date: December 15, 2009
Reviewer: nikoman, Sacramento, CA USA
I own both the 750Gb and 1TB versions of this drive and I love them. The cable that ships with them is of a nice quality (too thick for its own good) and I think being too short doesn't help either. They do pop off easily with the slightest gaze (if you look at them wrong) - but I can't fault the drive due to a cheap-ass cord. I bought another cord that is MUCH longer and it REALLY stays on the drive. As for the dumb back up utility that keeps popping up is no longer an issue since I disabled it using WD's latest firmware. I will keep this review plain and simple and so far I give them 5 stars due to their massive capacities.
J&R Computer/Music World