Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive (Midnight Black)
by Western Digital
|
Our Price: $246.99 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $129.99 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
|---|
Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive (Midnight Black)
Customer Review: Nothing But a Head Ache!
Summary: 1 Stars
I'm truly sad to say that this product has been nothing but a head ache and waste of time for me. I really wanted to be happy with this product, and I was for about a month or so. Then I got an error stating that a driver had crashed. It was all down hill after that. All of a sudden, music I had downloaded onto this external hard drive was playing very choppy, it also told me that my storage was almost completely maxed out. I had around 4000 mp3's on a 1 TB hard drive. That should not have been anywhere close to max capacity. I have an old beat-up 20 GB iPod with 3000 mp3's on it, and it's not even half full. It also stopped allowing me to use the "disconnect safely from computer" option, and none of the three diagnostic options worked, or the update the driver option. Then, recently, it recommended I check for new drivers, and miraculously it actually updated them. Of course the flip side of this was it erased all of my files on the external hard drive... ALL OF THEM! Several months of work, down the drain!
So I called up WD's technical support, and got someone who barely spoke English, and after 10 minutes of trying to spell out my name and the serial number of the product, he referred me to their web page where I could contact a data recovery company, and PAY them to TRY and recover my lost files, and afterward I could PAY to ship the faulty hard drive back to WD, and they would pay to ship me a new one. He was nice though.
I mean I'm basically back to where I was before I bought this product. The files that I had bought the external hard drive for are gone; but I'm also in the pit for the several months of my wasted time, and now I to waste more money on data recovering and shipping. Seems like they should be the ones fitting the bill for the data recover when it's a result of their faulty product.
I'll say that the good things about this product are that it's small, it looks real sexy and sleek, and it just has the one wire you plug into your computer's USB port to power up.
To sum it up, the My Passport Essential SE is that hot girl that starts going out with you, and one day you come home, to find that she's cleaned out your place...
I'll adjust my review after I get my replacement, if things improve, or get worse...
Customer Review: BEWARE OF NEW WD DRIVES!!
Summary: 1 Stars
Beware of the new My Passport WD Hard Drives (2009 onwards). After happily using WD hard drives for years, I will never buy from them again. These are the reasons why:
1. They have changed the mini USB connection to a non-standard micro USB. Is thinner, weaker and if you loose the cable you will not be able to reuse any of the cables you may have around from other electronic equipment. This new connection has not proven advantages and is harder to find replacements...
2. There is a partition with WD bloatware that you will not be able to erase. This means that every time you plug your hard drive, an emulated CD will appear and the annoying WD software starts, even if you don't want to. This is annoying if you don't use their software and slows down the time from connecting your drive to accessing your data. Why do they bully people into using their software? Is this even legal?.
3. The internal hard drive does not have the standard SATA connection. This means that if you want to use the My Passport hard drive to upgrade your laptops internal HDD it will not work. It also means that you could not use the enclosure to connect other hard drives.
4. They are very unreliable. Mine died after 2 weeks. The replacement they sent was tougher and doubled that... 4 whole weeks!! 2 dead hard drives in less than 2 months. This is not just bad luck. Coogle it.
I think the hard drive itself is not bad but the connection and enclosure may be what is going wrong. The problem is that as it is not a standard SATA, you can not just take the drive out, plug it into another enclosure, recover your data and send the drive back for replacement. IT IT FAILS, YOUR DATA IS GONE, even if the drive itself is still finctional. You just can get the data unless if you want to pay an expensive data recovery service which WD guarantee wont cover.
5. Is more expensive than other brands with out absolutely no advantage (other than it looks cooler)
For those reasons, Western Digital have lost another customer. The next replacement I will receive, I will sell it on Ebay. Apologies to whoever may buy it...
Really, think twice before buying it.
Customer Review: Cable is significant issue
Summary: 4 Stars
I think that, for the most part, what everyone else is saying here is fairly accurate. However, don't gloss over the cable issue. I use the drive at work and sometimes when I set my elbow on the desk the drive will unregister and re-register. Not always, but often enough that I finally broke down and contacted support.
First I tried going through e-mail support. Don't bother. All they will tell you is that you have to contact phone support for this issue. Then phone support, while very polite and helpful, was not aware of this known issue.
They told me that they will send me "a new cable" that the support guy said "should be in better shape than [my] old cable." I told him that the cable is 100% brand new. I've only plugged and unplugged the drive like twice since I've had it. I told him that it isn't an issue of it being worn out or anything like that.
I tried to explain the situation short of saying something like "the original cable is a bad design!" Which maybe I should have. I tried explaining the differences in the cables shown and described here, and again, he was very polite and somewhat understanding but I don't think that he really connected to exactly what I was saying.
We'll see if the new cable fixes the issue or not when it arrives. I'm hopeful, but not confident given the exchange.
The backup software is so-so. It isn't all that bad, it isn't all that good and it is actually easy enough to disable. That is pretty much a non-issue for me.
If someone selling these drives would assist in the cable situation it would be ideal, i.e. not just telling you to contact WD support and good luck.
Oh and another thing that should be known is that WD will give you 30 days of support for free from the date of your first call during the warranty period. After that they want to charge money for support. So either you resolve all of your support issues in those 30 days or you pay money for additional support even during the warranty period. Which I think kind of sucks for a company as huge as WD.
Customer Review: decent drive, disable the virtual drive it creates, don't install the software
Summary: 3 Stars
People have been complaining about the virtual drive that you get when you plug this drive into a USB port. As I was a little pissed off by this I thought I would post a simple solution.
Western Digital would have you download a program to hide the virtual CD (VCD). this is dumb. Why should I have to install software to hide a crappy feature that is annoying? Well, we don't. The answer is simple:
First off, do NOT install the Smartware software. It sucks in every way possible and will only cause you pain and agony in the long run. There are plenty of reviews that cover just how bad the software is. I do not need to repeat.
Second, the virtual CD that pops up is annoying. To disable it in Windows Vista (another piece of crap but came with laptop) just click on Start, then Control Panel, then System.... under system options you can select Device Manager.
Once you open device manager you will see "WD Virtual CD 070A USB Device" located in the "DVD/CD-ROM drives" section.
right click on the virtual cd line (using your RIGHT mouse button for you people that aren't aware that your mouse has more than one button) and you will get a small menu. Select "disable" ... you may be prompted to reboot your computer. Go ahead and do so if you are ready. The next time you plug in your WD Passport drive you will only get the drive folder, and not the extremely annoying virtual CD.
I can't stress enough that you should NOT install the software that comes with the drive. It is poorly written and a massive resource hog and will cause you problems later.
Overall, once you disable the crap that WD tries to force you to use it is not a bad drive. I have had no problems with the drive and have been using it for over a year and in very rugged and remote locations. I wouldn't hesitate to buy another one if I needed the space. However, as a backup device it's always good to have 2 if you can afford it. Putting all your eggs in one basket is usually bad ju ju when it comes to hard drives.
Customer Review: I was concerned about all the 1 star reviews....
Summary: 5 Stars
Until I remembered that most people are idiots... This is not a 1 Star Drive... this is a 5 Star Drive.
If you read the one star reviews, you will find that most people who wrote them are bothered by the Western Digital Smartware Software. Let me be perfectly clear. The Western Digital Software is NOT removable without a hardware hack, but you can prevent it from auto-running or auto-launching IF you update the drive software to the latest version. This software is necessary for an advertised feature of the drive: Data Encryption. It also does one click backups, and has some other utilities as well. Finder reported 999.2 GB Free on this disk ( Under Snow Leopard 10.6.2 )... So about 800 MB is used for overhead to do what it does. If this bothers you, then don't buy this drive.
The other complaint was about the cable. Either is was too loose or "proprietary". There may very well have been some loose cables in the early batches, but the one that came with my drive in March 2010 fits snug and secure. In fact, I can let the drive dangle in midair, suspended by the cable, and the drive still stays mounted. I do not recommend doing that though... The cable is NOT proprietary. It is an 18" micro USB cable. This is a standardized interface that is used on newer devices like the new blackberries, and the Amazon Kindle for example.
Pros:
- Huge Capacity (999.2GB Free)
- Very Small (2.5" Drive inside Enclosure)
- Bus Powered (No External Power Supply Needed)
- Affordable (Currently $149)
- Cross Platform Encryption Option
- Free Cross Platform Backup Software & Utilities
Cons:
- WD Smartware Software is not removable and takes up 800 MB of space.
Bottom Line:
Epic Win for Western Digital & Amazon. I will be buying more of these drives and recommending them to my friends and clients.
Fail for people who buy this drive without reading about it's well documented and advertised features, then complaining about it.