WD My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive (Black)

by Western Digital

• Automatic, continuous backup
• Maximum capacity
• Connectivity today; speed for tomorrow
• Dual USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 compatibility
• Up to 3x faster transfer rates with USB 3.0

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 4.3 x 3.3 x 0.7 inches ; 7.2 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0041OSQ9S
• Item model number: WDBACX0010BBK-NESN
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,404 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
  • #45 in Electronics > Computers & Add-Ons > Data Storage > External Hard Drives
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 5, 2010

Product Description

Capacity: 1 TB | Color: Black

From the Manufacturer

Put your digital life on the high capacity my passport essential se 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.

Product Description

Put your digital life on the stylish, maximum capacity My Passport® Essential™ SE 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. A single drive with universal compatibility today and next-generation speed for tomorrow. Use it with USB 2.0 now and step up to USB 3.0 speed when you’re ready. Massive capacity in this small, stylish drive that is powered directly from the USB port on your PC. No separate power supply is needed.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

849 of 877 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Speed tests... October 21, 2010

By Strohmian VINE™ VOICE

Color Name:Black| Size Name:1 TB|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

### PHYSICAL ###
One terabyte that fits in your jeans' pocket. I don't want to go all "when we were young we walked 10 miles to school, etc." on you, but my first hard drive was such that I would have needed 50'000 of 'em to match the capacity, occupying a solid cube 9 feet on each side and setting me back 30 million dollars. That's mind- blowing progress indeed, and while the original advances were made by firms like Seagate and IBM, those have mostly sold off/sourced out in the meantime, leaving Western Digital as the Bleeding Edge hard drive brand.

This device looks like a cigarette holder with a glossy finish. The edges are rounded, and the usb connector is the only opening in the case, so for my occasional transport I just carry the drive in my jacket as-is. It would have been super- neat to have a rubber flap over the usb and perhaps a more scratch- resistant matte finish, but there is no issue here, especially since WD offers inexpensive hardshell and neoprene cases.

### USB3 ###
Finally, ten times the speed of USB2! The USB consortium calls it Super Speed, to distinguish it (not) from the Hi-Speed of USB2 and the Full Speed of USB1. It's beyond me why they don't just name it "5Gbit USB", a moniker which would pit it favorably against eSATA, Ethernet, Firewire, etc... but at least there's a hilarious joke in there for Sci-Fi comedy fans (Google "They've gone into plaid" for the reference, first video link).

But not so fast, Dark Helmet. First, just because the interface is ten times speedier doesn't mean the drive is, and second, it's likely that even your 2010 PC needs an adapter in the form of a PCIx card. And if it does, the USB ports will be on the back of the computer, which may be a problem as the cable that comes in this package is only 16" long. If you need more, you'll have to purchase a Micro USB 3.0 cable, the connector on the drive end is different from USB2. Currently, these cables are rare (none on Amazon!) and expensive, so be careful not to misplace the one you got.

### SPEED ###
This external drive works with both USB2 and USB3, so the question is, is it worth the extra cost of the USB3 adapter, and what exactly is the speed gain one can expect? To figure that out, I've run two tests, one a simple hard drive test via HD Tune, and one a filecopy test.

- HD Tune: (see screenshots for details): with USB2, the interface is the limiting factor, with a transfer rate of 33 MB/sec over the entire range. With USB3, you get the pure drive performance and up to 87MB/sec can be achieved in the outer regions and still a decent 45 MB/sec in the inner regions (the outer regions of the spinning disk have higher velocity and more sectors, hence the higher rate).
- File copy: I copied a batch of 7000 files back and forth a couple times and measured read and write performance separately. Averaged over 5 runs, I found that the read performance gain of USB3 was 19% and the write performance gain was 25%. It needs to be noted that in this scenario there was a lot of overhead - the copy program (robocopy), the file seeks, the destination drive, etc.

So what to make of this? The raw read performance as measured by HD Tune is 2 to 3 times faster with usb3 - nice to see that WD's marketing blurb "up to 3 times faster" is actually true! However, this advantage quickly comes down as you use more complex operations such as copying small files. Given the choice again, I probably wouldn't bother with an USB3 PCI card and just wait for my next PC to have it onboard. If you mainly copy large files (such as movies), you may benefit more from USB3 than I do.

### SOFTWARE ###
The drive comes with some software on it (in lieu of an installation CD) which does two things: enable a hardware encryption and do backups. I've fiddled with it for a while but it left me unsatisfied. Under my (admittedly elderly) WinXP the GUI had rendering problems (holes in the windows!), it wasn't half as intuitive as other software, and at least once I activated the encryption but it didn't take. It also installs a virtual CD, what do I need that for!? The good news here is that WD seems to ship this software with all their external drives now, so it stands to reason/hope that they'll improve on it and you'll be able to download an upgrade.
Of course, if you happen to be a Mac or Win7 Ultimate user, you don't need the WD software at all, just use the built- in stuff.

### CONCLUSION ###
This is a fantastic little device: a full terabyte, compact and reasonably future- proof; although you might not want to bother with USB3 for now if you don't already have it. I'm deducting 1 star for the mediocre software, otherwise I'm very happy with this capable small data vault.

228 of 242 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars WD Portable 1 TB HD - worked flawlessly September 21, 2010

By Sudarshan Karkada VINE™ VOICE

Color Name:Black| Size Name:1 TB|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

First Impressions Review:

This is the first time I have ever used a portable (tiny) external hard drive. I currently use a Cavalry dual disk external drive in RAID configuration which is huge and not really portable.

This new WD drive is fantastic in that it is quite small, doesn't require external power, and it is quite good looking. It is amazing how they fit 1 TB drive in such a small package. One bonus is that when I replace my computer in future with one that has USB 3.0 interface, this drive can handle that. (It works fine with USB 2.0 also.) The device looked and felt solid.

The USB port that is on the drive seems to be proprietary, but it could be a standard port for USB 3.0. The cable that comes with the drive fits snugly and works well. The cable should be saved carefully - I don't have any other cable with that specialized connector.

The backup software resides on the hard disk of the drive. I didn't bother installing that software. I just want to use the drive as plain old storage drive. I connected the drive to a PC with Windows 7, the OS complained with "WD SES Device USB Device - No Driver Found", but showed the drive contents anyway. I could immediately use the drive without haveing to do anything.

Drive properties showed the following:
Used 565 MB
Free 930 GB
Capacity 931 GB

I have split the 1 TB drive into 3 partitions easily (using Win7's built-in tools). I copied a bunch of JPG files into one of the partitions. Everything went smoothly. I am yet to find any issues with the device.

I will update this review if I come across anything significant as I continue to use it.

169 of 180 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars High capacity in a slick looking little external hard drive October 20, 2010

By PT Cruiser TOP 50 REVIEWER

Color Name:Black| Size Name:1 TB|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

I can remember when I was impressed by a 356 MB hard drive on my new computer. (Remember those days?) Now here's this back-up external drive that is a terabyte, something that not so many years ago was in the domain only of supercomputers that took up whole rooms. The really impressive thing is that this is such a nice compact little drive, not much bigger than a deck of playing cards. I've used other drives for back up and have always avoided the back up software that came with some of them, fearing it would get in the way and slow things down when I'm working or that it would take too much time to figure out what to back up and how often to do so. As a result, I often forget to back things up, which could be a disaster if I ever had a hard drive failure.

Now the nice thing about a large external drive such as this one is that it has tons of space and I can just back up everything and keep several copies. The software that comes on the drive installs in minutes and checks for updates for both software and firmware. It gives you a choice of what to back up and the choice of pausing backups when you're working, so you don't have to worry about it getting in your way when you're doing something else. It was simple to enter password protection and comes with a manual on the drive that's easy to understand, as manuals go. You can also choose how many backups to keep at a time and where you'd like those stored. The settings are simple to set up, even partitioning the drive if you decide to do so.

I've used it for a few weeks now and hardly notice it being there. It just does its thing in the background and I can check the backups so I know they're there. Using Windows XP, it puts a little icon down in the menu bar where I can check at any time to see how much space has been used, whether or not it is locked and if the temperature is OK. Unlike some drives I've used in the past, this one seems to run pretty cool and I've never felt it being warm, even when the summer temperatures in the room were warm. I like that it's so small, yet has such high capacity. I'm using a 2.0 interface but it's nice to know it has the 3.0 capability for future use with perhaps a different computer. Two thumbs up for this external hard drive.