Buy WD My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 3.0/2.0 Portable External Hard Drive (Cool Silver)WD My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 3.0/2.0 Portable External Hard Drive (Cool Silver) Product Description:
- Dual USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 compatibility
- Connectivity today; speed tomorrow
- Up to 3x faster transfer rates with USB 3.0
- Automatic, continuous backup
- Hardware encryption, password protection
Product Description
Put your digital life on the stylishly small my passport essential portable hard drive. with wd quality and usb 3.0 and usb 2.0 connectivity, this drive is designed for today with tomorrow in mind. visual backup software and password protection with hardware encryption ensure your data is protected. lightweight and easy to carry, this drive is ideal for fast storage to go.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
118 of 119 people found the following review helpful.
Small, fast, high-capacity drive
By Jaroslaw Kaczynski
It was time to create fresh backup of my laptop, so I got this blue, 500GB WD drive because it was one of the cheapest and I know the manufacturer (used their products before).The drive is definitely the smallest 2.5 inch portable drive I have ever seen personally. It was the first USB 3.0 device I have purchased, so discovering new, wider USB 3.0 connector on the drive side was a surprise to me. Please note that that the larger plug on the cable (the one you insert into the computer) is also USB 3.0, but fortunately it fits into any USB socket. If your computer does not have USB 3.0 hardware, you can use regular 'micro-USB' cable to connect: just plug it into the wider of the two sections of the socket in the drive.First backup with the drive was successful, but lengthy as usual. I'm going to buy USB 3.0 express card for my laptop to speed up the process in the future.One note about the software that comes with the drive - it is horrible! While my hardware experience with WD drives was OK in the past, their software was always of questionable quality. I decided to give it another try after 3 year break, but I had to uninstall and undo some damage manually pretty quickly. I have requested not to install backup part of the software (I'm using operating system facilities to backup), but the software installed 'shadow copy' and some other resident software on my machine anyway. Later on the software suggested firmware update, but could not detect the drive during update!. The worst offense was the change of drive letters on my machine: I have main hard drive with two partitions, DVD drive and flash drive - WD software stole D: letter drive from my DVD drive and turned it into G: drive. Of course uninstalling the software did not return the correct drive order, so I had to do it myself. Conclusion: DO NOT INSTALL THE SOFTWARE THAT COMES WITH THE DRIVE - only the driver that is required on Windows to avoid pop ups when the drive is connected.
122 of 135 people found the following review helpful.
Another Winner from Western Digital
By Lawrence H. Bulk
I recently received this Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBACY5000ABK-NESN (Midnight Black) from Amazon Vine and I am very pleased with it. It is the first USB 3.0-capable device I have owned. I am using this, and all of my other external hard drives, as storage units only (in other words, for backing up and storing my document files and folders, my music, my pictures, and my videos, not for backing up the computer itself). It is a nice large portable hard drive, as large or larger in capacity than most laptop computers. It requires no power other than that supplied by the USB port.When it arrived I opened the box and retrieved the drive. Having done that, I gently shook the drive to make certain that nothing was loose inside. Then I physically examined it to make certain that the ports were properly fitted and aligned with the outer case. Everything was fine. At that point I inserted the supplied cable's plug into the (new-type) miniature USB port on the drive and inserted the regular USB plug into my computer. Both ends fit easily and perfectly.As I am using the Ubuntu Linux operating system on my computer, the drive opened instantly. I saw the usual WD backup programs, etc., which are of no use to me and which I immediately removed. (From what I have read, many people do not need or want WD's backup programs. Fortunately, on this drive, they are easy to delete.) The drive now has 465.6 GiB of available space. (My system analyzer shows that 100 MB is being used for "something" but I don't know what it is.) I copied some files onto the drive and they installed perfectly, just as they have done on my other external hard drives.As is, it will work perfectly with Microsoft Windows systems and, with reformatting, it will work with Apple Mac systems.This particular external drive is quite nice - small, well-made, and convenient to use. I cannot comment on the speed of USB 3.0 transfers as I don't have anything which has USB 3.0 as yet. When it becomes standard on notebook or netbook computers, I'll buy one of those; I am looking forward to faster transfer speeds. From the examples of file transfer given on the outer box, the speed differential does not appear to be as fast as I had been led to believe from articles in magazines and on the internet. But any speed increase will be welcome.Of course, like all USB drives, it is fully compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 (though I do not know the power arrangements with USB 1.1).The only point on which I cannot comment definitively in this review is that of longevity. I will have had to own it for several years before I can say anything truly useful about that! But all of my other Western Digital hard drives have worked perfectly from Day One and all continue to work perfectly.I hope this information may be of some interest to anyone who wishes to purchase this drive. I have to admit that I am somewhat prejudiced: I own a half-dozen or more Western Digital hard drives and I like them all very much. My oldest, a 40 GB (which was considered HUGE at the time I bought it, perhaps 6 or 7 years ago) is still in regular use as are all the others. As I said, all of them have held up beautifully so I should expect that this one will too.In my opinion, if you are currently in the market for a larger portable hard drive, this is the one to buy as it will be usable with all versions of USB for the foreseeable future. I highly recommend it.I also strongly recommend that you buy more than one external hard drive (preferably this one as it has a large capacity and is USB 3.0-capable) on which you save your information (redundancy). Should your computer's hard drive or even (or also) ONE of these drives be damaged or corrupted in some way, you will still have your data. That's what I do. It's cheap insurance! The chances of losing your computer's hard drive and TWO external hard drives should be quite low. (I think that there is a greater chance of your computer's hard drive to fail than there is of one of these externals to do so.)Thank you for reading and considering my opinions.==================================================================================================================================Update: October 20, 2010I REALLY like this hard drive. How much? Well, I just bought four (4) more of them - three from J&R Music & Computer World via Amazon (J&R is one of their 'partners'), two black ones and one blue one, and one through J&R itself (a red one, which Amazon has not been stocking).The three I purchased through Amazon arrived yesterday; I'm still waiting for J&R's shipment. The ones I have received all function perfectly. They are extremely well-made.I am giving my older USB 2.0 320GB drives to my wife so she can have extra storage for her audios, videos, pictures, etc. (she has quite a lot of them, much more than I do, and she was running out of space) and I shall be using these newer ones for backing up our computers, the task for which I used the older ones previously. If and when we upgrade to newer computers which feature built-in USB 3.0, we'll be ready with these drives.Obviously I like this large and convenient portable external hard drive very much and I'm quite certain that you will too.==================================================================================================================================Update: November 29, 2010I ordered ANOTHER one of these drives from Amazon, this time in Silver; it arrived today. Like all the others (I now own six of these units - the 'free sample' one I got from Amazon Vine and the five more which I've purchased), it is constructed faultlessly and works perfectly.I like Western Digital products (I have a full dozen of their external drives), I like the company (they care about their customers: I can make this statement from first-hand experience), and I very much like this particular product.==================================================================================================================================Update: January 31, 2011Do you need a case for this product or a similar one? Take a look at this AmazonBasics Hard Carrying Case for My Passport Essential - Black. While as of this date it is not yet available, courtesy of Amazon Vine I received my review sample today and I like it very much. If you are interested in it, you could place it into your Wish List and order it when it becomes available.==================================================================================================================================Update: August 5, 2012Though it was not his intention, "AverageCitizen" made a comment which impelled me to revisit this review and tell you that I now DO own a computer with two USB 3.0 ports. Thus I can now take full advantage of these drives' capabilities. Let me tell you: USB 3.0 is FAST. I am noting, in the real world, transfer speeds about four times faster than what I was able to get using these drives with USB 2.0 ports. I transferred 625 GB of data FROM one of my newer 1 TB WD hard drives TO another one via my computer's USB 3.0 ports and the process took slightly under two hours. That translates to about 85 MB/s. I continue to HIGHLY recommend this particular 500 GB hard drive and Western Digital external hard drives in general.Lawrence H. Bulk
38 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Very solid entry for Western Digital
By I. R. Smart.
While USB 3.0 devices are slow to trickle out into the mainstream, Western Digital has released this 500GB USB 3.0 (USB 2.0 compatible) drive that works just as you'd expect it to.Transfer speeds are what you'd expect over USB 2.0 (i.e. average), and the drive is very quiet. I suspect it's a 5400rpm drive inside...Some things to note:1.) The device itself is pretty small. Very, very portable.2.) It has a plastic coating that scratches very easily, sadly.3.) I don't see an easy way to open the casing to put in a larger drive in the future...4.) The USB 3.0 cable is different from your normal USB 2.0 cable, but for USB 2.0 use you can use a standard MicroUSB cable, and I tested this to work perfectly. USB 3.0 is MicroUSB + an additional port next to it for USB 3.0 speeds, but you can just use the MicroUSB part for older systems!Overall, this worked great on my 2009 i7 iMac formatted in HFS, and on Windows 7 formatted as NTFS. No issues with either.It's a very solid drive so far, the price is reasonable for this new USB 3.0 technology, and I can't find any reasons not to give it 5 out of 5!So.... 5 stars out of 5!
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