My Passport Essential WDMES5000 - Hard drive - 500 GB - external - Hi-Speed USB - cool silver

by Western Digital

Product Details

• Item Weight: 3.7 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• ASIN: B001G8Z3E8
• Item model number: WDMES5000TN
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 18, 2008

Product Description

These elegant portable drives are simple to use, light and easy to carry, and require no power Adapter -- they are powered directly through the USB cable. Pack up your office files and take them home. Carry thousands of songs or pictures. Synchronize files between home and office and encrypt everything on the drive for added security. WD Sync synchronization and Encryption Software lets you take your critical Data with you. Plug My Passport into any PC, Edit files, read e-mail, and view photos. Then sync all of your changes back to your home or office computer. Your data is protected with 128-bit encryption (Windows only). It's perfect for business travelers who needs to transfer large amounts of data from their laptop to a client's computer, or daily backups as insurance against accidents from mishandled luggage or coffee spills. Also comes in handy if you're worried about laptop theft and someone else having access to your important data, you can store it on this portable encrypted drive instead. For all those precious pictures, videos, Music and data files, this external Hard Drive is a must have.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mac Friendly!, January 16, 2009

By 

kate (dublin, ireland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Passport Essential WDMES5000 - Hard drive - 500 GB - external - Hi-Speed USB - cool silver (Electronics)

I'm running a MacBook with Leopard (I bought the computer in Dec 2007) and this My Passport played nice. It is honestly plug-and-go, especially with Apple's Time Machine software. Take this HD out of the box, plug it in the Mac and it will take care of the rest. It could not be easier to back up your computer.

USB cable is a bit short, if I'm looking for things to gripe about, but if you have a spare firewire/USB cable you'll be fine.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dead in Six Months, May 8, 2009

By 

Mike Owens (Fort Worth, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Passport Essential WDMES5000 - Hard drive - 500 GB - external - Hi-Speed USB - cool silver (Electronics)

I've never had a USB drive fail. Not only did this one fail, it did so in six months.

In my case, it was the controller that went bad. I broke the case and plugged the internal drive into a BLAC-X USB adapter and the drive itself worked fine. But so much for my portable (and pretty) drive now.

Other problems with this drive include it going to sleep and then never waking up. I would have to unplug the drive and plug it back in. It got to the point where I would have to do this 2 and 3 times, and finally today it no longer responded at all. I tried to connect it to another machine and it still failed, so it's not just my machine.

Based on my experience, I wouldn't recommend this drive.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Light Sleek Hard Drive Works Flawlessly as Mac Time Machine, March 11, 2010

By 

SanjeevP "Bottom Line" (Michigan, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: My Passport Essential WDMES5000 - Hard drive - 500 GB - external - Hi-Speed USB - cool silver (Electronics)

I have used it for 6 months now and it has worked flawlessly as Time Machine backup drive. I wish the speed was a little faster, to some extent, hampered by the speed of USB 2 standard. It takes more than an hour to back up 320 Gb MacBook hard drive. I used it first in my MacBook and now it does not work with my Windows XP computers and I see that it is formatted as Mac OS Extended (case Sensitive, Journaled). I am not sure whether it came like that or Mac OS changed the formatting without me being aware.

Prior to this, I had used Western Digital WDXMS1200TN Passport 120 GB USB 2.0 2.5-Inch Portable Hard Drive for 3 years, again, without any problems with Windows XP and Mac OS. But I used that one with Windows XP first and then it needed to be reformatted as Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive, Journaled) to work with Mac as Time Machine. The drive still works well after three years, but I had to reformat for the second time as MS DOS (Fat 32) to be able to use with both Mac OS & Windows XP as just an external hard drive, not Time Machine backup drive. WD Sync software for Windows XP backup that it came pre-installed with was painfully slow and imperfect and basically useless.

In the past I have used a Fantom hard drive that died in a few months and two Lacie hard drives, which still work but are noisy.

This Passport drive is very sleek, light, small, portable, quiet, USB powered, reliable and works well with both Windows and Mac OS with proper formatting. If you want to use with both, format as MS DOS (Fat 32); for Mac OS Time Machine format as Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive, Journaled); and for Windows use only format as NTFS.