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The world’s most popular portable drive is now smaller than ever. And it’s smarter than ever with WD SmartWare data management and backup software that backs up your data automatically and continuously, shows your backup as it happens, and restores lost files effortlessly. Password protection and military-grade, 256-bit hardware-based encryption lets you secure your data. One of the five beautiful colors is just what you need to make you look smart (and very stylish). WD’s smallest portable drive ever - WD is an expert in portable storage, so they designed a smaller, high-quality integrated USB hard drive inside a stylish package. With a variety of fun colors, there’s sure to be one to suit your style. WD SmartWare - 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 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, and more from the WD SmartWare control center. Drive lock - Gain peace of mind knowing that your data is protected from unauthorized access or theft with password protection and military-grade 256-bit hardware-based encryption. Ready to plug-and-play with Windows PCs - if you’re a Mac user, check out our Mac version of this product. USB 2.0 powered - 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 that uses recycled material and minimizes waste. We encourage you to recycle it.
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Technical Details
- Automatic, continuous backup- Visual backup control center
- Password protection and 256-bit encryption
- USB 2.0 interface
- Several colors to choose from including Black, Pacific Blue, Real Red, Cool Silver
See more technical details
By Justin Schmidt (woodinville, wa United States)
Like an idiot, I actually own 2 of these things, I purchased one when my old school 160G WD hard drive went out and I almost lost all my pictures, music and movies. To give it credit, that one had lasted me about 4 years. Then I get the passport, what a piece of junk. The sync software might be a good idea if I only had one computer. But I have a laptop and a PC and it just does not jive between the two. So I uninstalled that function.
Now if I try to access it through 'my computer' it just says 'access denied.' I've checked multiple sources on the web, I've tried changes my security settings, nothing. Then I bought another one, just so I could try and rescue my data, it worked for about 2 days, then it started doing the same thing.
By Eric S. Olstad (New Jersey, USA)
I like WD's external drives as well as their internals. This one is great -- for a disk. It's small (just a bit bigger than the palm of my hand), has a micro USB plug and is fast as you would expect. The only problem I ran into, which was pretty major, was that the software did not install on my W7 x64 machine. I got an error no matter if I ran the exe or the msi -- something about a missing file in Program Files. So unfortunately I could not review the software for this product, which seems to be the major difference between this drive and WD's other externals (aside from the slight shrinkage).
Unlike most of the other externals I've worked with, this one does not have all of its drivers built into windows or available in windows update. The drive will install fine as a storage device, but there's an SES driver that you must load manually. It wasn't a problem because the driver is included on the drive so you just have to go into Device Manager and update the driver for the outstanding issue. There's also an msi package to install the driver if you don't feel comfortable working with Device Manager.
Looking up exactly what SES is, it's clear that other users did not bother to check the drive for the SES drivers or possibly did not know how to install them. There are many complaints about the missing drivers.
There's actually no documentation with the product that indicates exactly what SES is. The best I came up with is SCSI enclosure services, but that doesn't exactly make any sense ([...]) with regard to a standalone external drive. Searching Western Digital's site on the issue is a frustrating experience to say the least. The included manual only talks about installing the SES driver to prevent the hardware popup in the case when you don't install the SmartWare software. So perhaps it's related to SmartWare, which makes it worthless to me at this point since SmartWare failed to install.
This seems to be a typical external otherwise. It's USB 2.0, but I plugged it into my USB 3.0 port. I was able to get 35 MB/sec write speeds at first, but they dropped down to 25 after a little bit. Read speeds were around 25 as well. This is just 5 MB/sec above the limit of USB 2.0, so the drive is not particularly speedy.
The micro USB cable included is pretty short. I wish it were about 6 inches longer.
The drive includes a 2 year warranty, which is standard for externals.
It is very unfortunate I was not able to test out the software since that seems to be a major selling point with this product. My star rating certainly reflects the software's failure to install.
However, I did read up a bit on the new software. Some users report that the software is annoying, invasive and crash prone (possibly an older version). Other users report that you can't even remove the software from the drive as it is a permanent partition. I have verified that that second claim is not the case. There is only a single partition, and clearing up the 600 MB of files (mostly docs in every language) gives you 465GB, which is what you would expect after formatting a 500GB drive.
I would like to see a simple backup solution. I am not too happy with the Windows 7 backup utilities, but I use them anyway because they work. Again, it is unfortunate I could not test WD's new SmartWare software. Perhaps I will find a new version on their web site in the near future. But that doesn't get them past the fact that the packaged software is broken.
Price-wise, you might be able to find a larger drive for the same price with similar features.
By judolphin (Florida, USA)
Verdict: Form factor is too wide for 2.5" laptop bag pockets. Glossy finish scratches when looked at incorrectly. Performance is middling at best. It's decidedly average. I never plunk down $80 on a 3-star product. Neither should you. Buy a different hard drive.
Appearance: It looks very sleek for the first 5 minutes you own it, though a matte finish would have looked better for much longer. If you buy this hard drive, make sure you buy a carrying case. The glossy black exterior scratched merely from sitting inside a computer bag overnight -- the bag was never moved.
Ease of installation: It was 100% plug-and-play. Just plugged in the Micro USB connector into my computer, and the hard drive was ready to use seconds later.
Ease of use: As stated earlier, it's plug-and-play. Don't bother with WD's proprietary software; I consider software irrelevant regardless of the brand of hard drive. Of course, take this with a grain of salt if you feel proprietary software included with a hard drive is important. I simply do not.
Software: Unusable. Use Microsoft's free SyncToy instead to back up your data (or one of dozens of other Open Source/freeware solutions on the Web). They did finally get rid of the ridiculous Virtual CD partition, which is a plus.
Ease of Mind: Backing up your files always gives ease of mind, regardless of how you do it.
Design quality: The form factor is small, but does not fit in the pocket specifically made for 2.5" hard drives in my laptop bag. My Iomega hard drive fits into the pocket easily. That is a big minus for portability -- you want the hard drive strapped in the bag, you don't want it sitting free in a larger pocket. Aesthetically, I cannot forgive WD for making a *portable* hard drive glossy. What in the world were they thinking? I would never spend my money on this for that reason alone -- I'd find one that doesn't look irreparably horrible the first time you start using it.
Micro USB Connector: It does the job perfectly, but is literally only a one-foot cable. A slightly longer one would have been nice to prevent accidental unplugs when moving the laptop. It also may be difficult to plug into certain desktop computers, depending on the placement of USB ports. In reality, this alone should not stop anyone from buying the hard drive since you can buy longer Micro USB cables for about $2 apiece. Please note that unlike most portable hard drives I've owned, this model uses Micro USB, not Mini USB. This is a neutral difference: neither is proprietary, and both cables can be purchased cheaply.
Performance: Speed was within +/- 5% in all tests when compared to my 3 year-old 160 GB Iomega 2.5" hard drive. Considering this is a brand new model, I have to think "no worse than my 3-year-old hard drive" is something of an indictment. So, performance is "acceptable", but certainly not "above average".
By Mute208 (SF Bay Area, CA)
In my stubbornness, I have built my own external drives by placing internal drives inside external enclosures. This has served me well over the years but the benefits of a DIY external drive have greatly diminished mainly due to a drop in prices, nearly comparable warranties, and attractive yet durable enclosures. The Western Digital My Passport Essential ultra-portable hard drive is only the second pre-built external drive I've ever owned.
PROS:
- Attractive and compact design
- Good performance
- No external power supply required
- Rubber feet keeps it in place
- White power/activity light is tasteful
CONS:
- Easy to smudge and attract dust
- SES driver needs to be installed if SmartWare not installed
- Short 2 year warranty
When reading up on this drive, I found no shortage of complaints in regards to the SmartWare app as well as loose cable connections. I was apprehensive about the quality due to those reviews, but it turns out that it was unwarranted.
DESIGN
I am not a big fan of glossy plastic because of how easy they are to smudge and how easily they attract dust. Maintaining their good looks is a chore and the WD My Passport Essential is no exception. A matte finish may not look as nice when clean, but certainly looks better than dusty, glossy plastic. Aside from that, I found the drive attractive and very portable. The white power/activity indicator light is a teeny little pinhole-sized light and is just bright enough to let you know it's there, but not so bright as to be distracting. The micro-USB connector is on one of the short sides of the drive. The cable fit firmly enough to not jiggle loose, but honestly, once I place a drive, I rarely have a need to move it, especially while it's running. The rubber feet at the bottom of the drive keep it from being accidentally moved around on a flat surface.
PERFORMANCE
Needless to say, most portable and desktop external drives are of the 5400RPM and slower variety. This is optimal mainly to reduce heat, which then allows more flexibility in creating a sleek, portable enclosure without the use of bulky fans. The trade-off is obviously performance. Still, if you are not regularly dumping hundreds of GB of data back and forth at the same time on a regular basis, you shouldn't notice too much of a difference. The following are benchmark results using HDTunePro for an Iomega Prestige/Seagate ST9500325AS (500GB) drive and the Wester Digital My Passport Essential (500GB) drive. As you can see, the WD actually performed slightly better.
Iomega Prestige/Seagate ST9500325AS
Transfer Rate Minimum: 26.3 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum: 30.7 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average: 27.8 MB/s
Access Time: 24.7 ms
Burst Rate: 27.6 MB/s
CPU Usage: -1.0%
WD My Passport Essential 071A
Transfer Rate Minimum: 28.7 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum: 33.0 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average: 32.3 MB/s
Access Time: 19.0 ms
Burst Rate: 33.3 MB/s
CPU Usage: 7.7%
The 500GB drive comes pre-formatted in NTFS with 465GB of available space, exactly the same as my Iomega Prestige drive. There are some devices that require FAT formatted drives to be able to see them so if you have problems with your device seeing the drive, that might be the issue. Mac users will need to reformat it.
SOFTWARE
For the sake of writing a complete review, I wearily installed the SmartWare software off of the hard drive. I prefer my own backup procedures so that part of the suite did not interest me. The locking feature was interesting and I thought that some of the maintenance tools were useful. Overall however, it didn't offer enough for me to want to dedicate an entire application on my system for a single drive, especially when it could run just fine without it. I didn't have the same grotesque aversion to it that some users had however. One definite annoying point about SmartWare is that if you choose not to install it, you MUST install the SES device driver on Windows machines just to avoid the hardware popup wizard from displaying each time you connect the drive. When you connect the drive for the first time, all the drivers for it will install correctly except for the SES device driver. The drive comes with the drivers on the disk but need to be installed manually. Again, this is only if you don't install SmartWare. Unfortunately, Western Digital did not document this anywhere except in their PDF manual on the disk. They should have added it to the small note they included in the package.
WARRANTY
Hard disk manufacturers keep changing their warranties around so it's always a good thing to check before buying. And everyone knows that hard disks can and will go bad at some point so having a good warranty is important. Western Digital only warranties the drive for 2 years, which is an entire year less than Iomega's warranty.
SUMMARY
I like the WD My Passport Essential overall. It performs well, is attractive, portable, and has lots of free storage space. However, companies like Toshiba and Iomega stand behind their drives for a year longer than Western Digital. Because the WD doesn't have anything really special going for it, the shorter warranty really stands out as a decisive con.
By Jim
I don't like or use backup software, therefore this review is of the hardware only. The way I use external hard drives is to drag and drop the files I want to save and thus protect from accidental loss and/or transfer from one computer to another onto them. When I used computers to operate a retail business I used automatic backup software (this was in the 1990's so as you might imagine, it was crude and slow compared to what's available today). I tried the backup software that came with a Simpletech external drive (only 160GB), and I quickly came to dislike it and to prefer dragging and dropping. By the time I got an Iomega external (1TB), I didn't even bother to see if it included backup software. This (500GB) external is the first Western Digital external hard drive I've owned and used.
I first plugged it into a 4-hub USB port that's attached to my desktop running Windows 7 64-bit. The Passport made a clicking sound, and I got a message that the driver wasn't found. I disconnected it and tried it on a laptop running Vista. I plugged the USB cable into the jack coming out of the back of the USB cable that attaches a portable laptop cooler (one of those things with fans that the laptop sits atop of) to the laptop, so again this was not a direct connection, but this time there was no clicking sound. After 10-15 minutes of the laptop doing some automatic stuff, a message that the driver had been found and installed appeared, and I was then able to drag and drop onto the drive, create folders and folders within folders (e.g., "Music," sub-folder "Stravinsky," etc.) on it, and that went smoothly as can be.
I then reattached it to the desktop, but this time I plugged the cable directly to a free USB port instead of to the 4-hub thing (a cheap, non-powered hub made by Targus that has yet to fail me - and I don't know if it had anything to do with my initial experience attaching the Passport to the desktop). It was recognized immediately, and I was able to drag and drop, etc., and open folders that I'd gotten from the laptop (e.g., I opened the Stravinsky MP3 files and played them in the desktop's Windows Media Player; after the music played directly from the Passport for about an hour I felt the Passport to see if it had gotten warm and if so how warm, and it's temperature didn't seem to have changed at all).
I've owned a 2GB USB flash drive for several years, and have recently considered getting one with more space, but I look at it this way: Considering the cost of gigabytes on USB flash drives, and taking the size of USB flash drives into account, the Passport, which is a tad smaller than my wallet and thinner by 1/3, with 500GB, is quite a bargain. There are other factors to be taken into account of course, such as the comparative mortality of flash drives and external hard drives. But if I had to choose between spending slightly less than the cost of a 500GB Passport Essential for a mere 32GB of USB flash drive storage (or a bit more than the cost of a 500GB Passport for a mere 64GB of USB flash storage), even taking the difference in size and the possible or predictable difference in mortality into account, I'm going to go with 500GB of storage in a package smaller than my wallet.
I will update this review should I experience problems with this unit in the future. I did not rate it on software because as I noted, I didn't use the software (and don't plan to). I didn't rate it on reliability because I haven't owned it long enough. I only gave the "microusb" connector 3 stars because I would prefer a beefier than "micro" plug (partly because I have fat fingers), but it's no worse than plugs I've gotten with digital cameras and camcorders. Ease of mind and speed get 4 stars from me because it will take me some time to know if these properties deserve more or fewer stars. Appearance gets 5 stars because it looks nice, but design quality gets a star knocked off because as other reviewers have noted, it's a fingerprint magnet. Ease of installation gets a star knocked off for the reasons I mention at the top of this review.
Would I recommend it? Definitely, to anyone who wants this combination of storage space, portability, and convenience, but again, I am only commenting on the hardware, not the software. And I think that anyone who purchases something like this must be prepared to make careful note of the warranty period in case of any problems. The manufacturer's warranty for this unit is 2 years for North America, and includes 30 days of free telephone support during the warranty period - the 30 day period begins when a customer makes her first call. Email support is provided for the entire warranty period, and the fine print also mentions an online knowledge base that is of course available to all 24/7. The manual for the Passport Essential is in PDF format on the drive itself. I haven't looked at it; no need to, and that's one of the conveniences I look for in external storage devices: plug and play without having to think about it. Installing this unit wasn't 100% hassle free as I note above, but it was hassle-free enough.
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