- 750GB 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
Product Description
See your life safe in one place with WD’s My Passport Essential SE USB drive. It offers maximum storage capacity for all your important files, videos, music, photos. With visual, automatic, continuous backup your data is backed up as soon as it’s changed. Maximum capacity. Maximum style. – 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. WD SmartWare – See your life safe in one place.See your backup as it happens – Seeing is believing. Visual backup displays your content in categories and show the progress of your backup.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.Bring back lost files effortlessly – Retrieve your valuable data to its original location whether yo… More >>
The most amazing thing about this product is the new backup software. WOW this is so easy. This is by far the best WD passport ever. This is the third WD passport I have had. I never like any of the software at all (I did love the product). And I can not stress the fact on how easy this new backup software is. This software alone is worth a lot. Finely a user friendly WD passport, Very user friendly! I will be recommending this product very highly. Thanks WD for making this super user friendly. My main reason I bought this was to back up my computer. I see some people just want a hard drive, I guess this would not be a good choice if you did not want the backup software.
1) The cable is standard USB Micro-B ([...]). Micro-B has many advantages over the prior Mini-B, and the standard B has never been an option for 2.5″ (or Blackberry or countless other, small devices).
2) It’s the 3 x 333GB/platter, 2.5″x12mm design, for 999.5GB (930GiB). Suprisingly it’s low-power and low-heat compared to my Seagate FreeAgent Go 500GB and earlier Western Digital drives. However, I’m noting far more vibration. It’s literally barely larger than the 2.5″x12mm inside, not as “long” as other 2.5″ external drives, although clearly the extra 2.5mm of the drive makes it another 5mm (half cm) high overall.
3) Western Digital isn’t the first vendor to include utilities in NAND EEPROM on a device. I have flash drives that do this as well. The diagnostics and support utilities are included in a device that looks like read-only optical drive #4 in the OS (e.g., CD-ROM #3 in Windows, with #0 being first, sr3 in Linux, sr0 being first). Frankly, I don’t mind it. If you don’t like it, use Windows’ Disk Manager to change the drive letter. E.g., I use T: for the disk, W: for the utility image. My _only_ issue was that Western Digital did _not_ get their driver signed by Microsoft — that’s a _major_ oversight (so 3 stars).
4) No issues with Linux whatsoever (5 stars). In fact I only use the first 128GiB (137GB) for FAT32, cylinders 1-8192 (255/63 heads/sectors), which works with anything that supports FAT32 and even old 28-bit ATA (with the 8192cyl/128GiB/137GB limitation). The rest of the disk I use for UDF (which most Windows versions can at least read, and NT6 aka Vista/2008/7 can write as well) and Ext3 (Linux).
5) I don’t recommend NTFS as it was never designed to be exchanged between systems, and you can only safely do such between Windows Server Domain Controllers of the same domain (long story) — and Windows doesn’t have a “read-only” mount option like Linux (let alone the Linux NTFS3g driver is safer than writing to NTFS from a Windows system that didn’t create it). This option continues to be overlooked by Microsoft, while they are finishing off the new FAT standard. They should just support UDF better, and at least do a decent job with UDF 2.5 support in NT6 aka Vista/2008/7.
I ignored the reviews because my wife found two of these on sale at Costco, and our MyBook backup had just died. I wanted two so we wouldn’t lose our data if one failed. (Fortunately, I got all 250 Gigs of info off the MyBook before it died).
Sure enough, you can’t open the directory on these things unless you go through the install of their proprietary programs. Furthermore, unlike the MyBook, you can’t use the same unit to store info from both the Mac and the PC. We intended to back up one Passport into the other each week, and keep #2 off-site. that isn’t going to work.
Back to Costco, which has a good return policy, and on to … RAID and two 1.0TB mirrored hot-swappable hard drives?
I was excited for the extra space on this new Western Digital HDD. When I received it, I realized the connection cable to the drive was not a standard USB mini cable. The supplied cable is very short in length and has a great tendency to work itself loose all the time making it very frustrating to actually copy stuff onto this drive. I’ve actually resorted to taping the connector into place. I would not have purchased this product had I known this in advance.
I have owned this hard drive for a few weeks now and honesty what was Western Digital thinking?
1.) The Micro-USB is good idea to save space and make it lighter but here is the problem. It is very easy for the drive to disconnect. This is huge flaw. I am going out to buy a new case for this drive with the same connector on the old passports. If you are like me and use this hard drive on a laptop and you have move around. The connector does come loose and you have to reconnect it.
2.) The Software…I paid for a 750GB drive. I work with computers every day. So I know the filing system takes up space, that’s fine, but when I have something I don’t need nor do I want on there wasting space I can use. Not really cool. I ended up using a program I have and doing a 3 time pass to sanitize this drive.
3.) The Reason I give this 2 starts is because I feel that Western Digital could have spent a little more time on R&D and product testing. But they chose to push it out in order to fulfill the demand for a larger self contained USB hard drive. The Good part of this is its Western Digital So I do have faith and confidence in the hard drive its self but not the case the company decided on for it.
- Commo Guy