Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive (Midnight Black)
by Western Digital
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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 |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive (Midnight Black)
Customer Review: Great drive.... But flawed!
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought this drive after my original WD 2tb MyBook Studio died on my a few weeks ago. I thought having a portable drive would help. So this is the drive my girlfriend and I both ordered. Her one, works like a charm, no problems. Mine on the other hand caught a bad case of the "click of death". This was within a week of receiving the drive. Amazon were great, explained the fault and they refunded my money.
The Review:
Looks:
In one word, chic. The drive is made of a black lacquered plastic. Although difficult to grip as this type of material is very slippery. It also attracts finger prints, palm prints and smudges like ants to a picnic! But if you keep a micro-fibered cloth handy (you get one free with the iPhone) you can keep it clean without any problems.
Software:
So there is no CD, it's all on the drive. You do not receive a 1tb drive. It's actually 960Gb. They partition this so that the drivers sit on the 200Mb partition. This way whenever you plug this baby into a PC/Mac the drivers are ready to go. Which is good, as all the software is there, but it's a hassle as you do not get what you think you are paying for.
Noise:
Well, before the click of death, you couldn't hear the drive running. Smooth, silent and best of all, didn't over heat like so many other drives I know of.
Connections:
So the USB port worked fine for me. I have not had any issues there. The cable was great, worked like a charm and before the "event" I never got disconnected.
Overall:
I have had two WD drives get the "click of death" and had that not been the case, I think i would have rather enjoyed this drive. It's sleek and sexy exterior would have been enjoyed by all who set eyes on it. Small enough to carry around and enough storage to carry EVERYTHING! My girlfriend would recommend this as her one is still working. I guess it down to a lucky dip. I hope this review helped!
Customer Review: I love Western Digital....WTF
Summary: 1 Stars
I just finished writing a review on another external hard drive by "verbatim", and how bad it was. I ended my review by encouraging buyers to use Western Digital Hard drives instead because they are reliable considering I own 4 of them and had never had problems with them.....Until NOW>
As many other buyers have stated: the software that comes with this drive is a total pain. I just want a simple drive that you plug in and drag files over to save them, like all the other drives I've ever owned. Not this one. When you plug it in, you can't use it unless you download/install WD's software. It simply won't let you store anything until you jump through some of Western Digital's hoops. I was not happy with this but decided "what the hell" and tried jumping through their hoops anyway. 1 hour later I'm still trying to figure out why I can't use my hard drive. It won't download, install, or work as a hard drive (and I have the spinning wheel of death on my mac). I am probably missing something or there is probably a solution to this. But the fact that I am this frustrated and it's taking this long to figure out how to get this drive to function is not worth it, knowing there are many other external hard drives for sale that don't involve any of these shenanigans with software. why does Western Digital try to force us to use this new software? Why isn't it optional? I'm sure there were good intentions but by reading all the other reviews on this Passport drive, I think this new software has done way more harm than good.
I am very sad and disappointed in Western Digital. They were my #1 choice in Hard drives. Now I am returning this drive and recommending every one else to stay clear of this hard drive model for now, especially if you are looking for a drive that you just plug in and start using right away- no hassles.
Time to start researching new external hard drives. (small passport types) ANy recommendations????
Customer Review: WARNING: Not a standard hard drive! Also, not really 1TB
Summary: 2 Stars
Unlike every other external hard drive on the market, this is NOT a standard hard drive in an external case.
Others have covered the connector and the annoying hidden partition which you cannot remove, so I won't discuss them here.
But what I will discuss is that while this is advertised as a 2.5" drive, it is not a SATA hard drive in an external case. The case is super small and the reason is that the USB connector plugs right into the back of the hard drive. There is no standard SATA connector on this drive, nor the adapter board you find in most drives. The controller board built into the hard drive itself has a USB plug.
Thus you WILL NOT be able to disassemble this and use it as an internal laptop hard drive. I suspect I'm not the only one who has bought this drive with this intention - especially since WD is not shipping the standard hard drive until 2010 to provide more capacity for making these externals. I figured, well, I'll just buy the external and take the drive out.
I don't know if they advertise this as a SATA Drive anyware, but it isn't. No SATA connector, custom drive controller board. Thus the only way to use this is an external drive.
The Drive is also not really 1TB. I know drive manufactures count bits rather than kilobits, but even with that measure, this is a 1TB drive with have a gig- 500MB- reserved for the unremovable software partition that WD decided to foist on us. Thus, the drive is actually 999.5 GB, not a TB. If they had just partitioned the drive normally and put their software there then nobody would be complaining-- those who wanted it could use it, those who didn't could repartition and go on their merry way.
Instead they bring the total capacity below the advertised capacity and put this unremovalbe software on there. Really not cool.
Customer Review: Smooth, Quiet, Fast... Better Than My Other Passports
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Customer Review: A Quick Return
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought this drive yesterday and I am returning it today. The reasons? There are two main ones. Like the first reviewer, I find it annoying that Western Digital bundles the drive with their automatic software utility. The first thing I did was reformat this drive using the disk utility on my macbook. The drive reformatted, but the bundled software remained on my desktop. I still had to eject both to unplug the drive. When I plugged it into my PC, the automatic software came up there too and informed me that there was no longer a partition able to accept their program and that I should make sure that the drive was formatted correctly. I formatted it FAT32 so that I could use it between my Mac and my PC. Every time I plug it into my PC, the new hardware wizard pops up and tells me that the drive was installed incorrectly and may not work properly. So far it does work properly, but I have no intention of going through this every time I want to access this drive on my PC. I know that I could probably reformat the drive another way, or use my Mac to erase the contents more thouroughly, but that leads me to my second complaint: the USB connector is awful. WD seems to have gone to the newer micro-USB connector. In addition to this making all my other USB cables obsolete, the connector will not stay in the drive. Any slight movement, and you lose connection with your computer (Which means going though the whole automatic software and hardware wizard nonsense again). Not very portable in my opinion.
I have used and liked WD drives in the past and was very excited to see a "portable" 1TB drive that did not require an external power source, but this drive will be going right back. I will spend the extra money for the Seagate 1TB freeagent go drive. I hope that one works right.