Western Digital Passport Essential 500GB Portable USB Drive-Black
- Box Contents - My Passport Essential 500GB Portable USB Hard Drive, USB 2.0 cable, Quick Install guide
- 500GB Hard Drive Capacity
- Installation is a snap because you don't really install this drive; you just plug it in and it's ready to use. There is no CD to install.
- Powered by the USB bus. No separate power supply is needed
- This ultra-portable drive fits easily in your pocket or purse, weighs only a few ounces, and holds tons of valuable data
I am on my fifth drive now
I bought this 1.5 years ago. After about 9 months, this first drive clicked. After another episode of clicking, I decided to exchange, to be on the safe side. RMA and customer service then seemed to be in the US. The second drive started clicking after about 2 months. I decided to just back up to an old, clunky external and live with the clicking. Then, it started to disconnect on its own every now and then, only to reconnect about a minute later. That became a nuisance, so I started the exchange process again; customer service now seems to be in India. The third drive only let me copy about 1/2 of my data (ca. 50 GB) onto it, then started clicking and complaining. The fourth drive let me save about 5 GB onto it, then disconnected completely and never connected again. They are now sending me a fifth drive. I am definitely buying from someone other than WD next time! Hope that solid state will soon be affordable...
Great Hard Drive at a Great Price
It has worked well for me for almost 18 months. I highly recommend it
Really Horrid Drive
For Mac users at least, this is an absolutely demonic drive. (Mine has 1Tb capacity but the problematic software is virtually the same.) The problems lie mostly in the software, not the drive itself. Why is it necessary to install proprietary driver software to use this drive when most drives simply use the built-in drivers in the Mac OS? And why does so much drive space have to be wasted on a separate virtual (virtually, stupidly wasteful) partition that cannot be erased? The HD Smartware drivers for Mac have absolutely gummed up my new MacBook Pro running 10.6.4. The smartware demons running in the background (even when the drive is not plugged in!) eat up tons of memory, plus hog as much as 98% of the CPU, making other programs like Safari stand stock-still for minutes at a time. Force-quitting the demons using Activity Monitor doesn't help, because they simply re-start and, while they're running, slows every other process down to a crawl or not working at all. Plus, I'd mention that the proprietary mini-USB cable failed after just two months and was hard to replace. Overall, this is one of the worst pocket drives I've ever owned. Oh, did I mention it was very, very expensive compared to the competition? Why pay less when you can get ten times the aggravation?
I'm a little afraid right now...
I've had this device for almost a year now. Last month it started to make some strange clicking sounds when connected to the PC. Sometimes it will click and disconnect. From what I read in other reviews I should copy its contents to another drive ASAP...
WD drive rocks
I have owned this for an year and half now, still going great. Also made additional purchases of WD hard drives for my relatives, friends etc and did not hear any complaint from them till now. Pros - Primarily used for backup. Copying is faster between PC and disk. - Sleek, fast, reliable, easy to use. Cons - Only USB. Note: Invest in a hard drive cover for its protection Register with serial number at WD site to get details on manufacturer warranty and updates.
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