- Brand Name: Western Digital
- Model: WDBABM0010BBK-NESN
- Hard Disk Size: 1 TB
- Warranty: 2 years limited warranty
- Hardware Platform: Pc
Product DetailsCapacity: 1 TB
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Product Description
Capacity: 1 TB
Amazon.com
The world's most popular portable drive now features maximum capacity to store all your favorite videos, music, photos, and important files. Still sleek and compact, you can load it up and take it with you anywhere.
Maximum capacity. Only a few milimiters thicker to accomodate our highest capacity mobile drives. Plenty of room for all your stuff. | See your life safe in one place. WD SmartWare software - A visual control center with a single screen view of all your data. From it you can back up, retrieve, and secure your files. | Password protection. An extra level of security with password protection and 256-bit hardware-based encryption. |
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Maximum capacity, maximum style - Store all your favorite videos, music, photos, and important files. Still sleek and compact, you can load it up and take it with you anywhere.
WD SmartWare™ - A 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 in 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, manage the power settings, and more from the WD SmartWare control center.
Find out more about WD SmartWare™
Drive lock - Gain peace of mind knowing that your data is protected from unauthorized access or theft with password protection and 256-bit hardware-based encryption.
Ready to plug-and-play with Windows PC's - if you're a Mac user, check out our Mac version of this product.
USB 2.0 interface - 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 from recycled materials to minimize waste. We encourage you to recycle it.
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Ideal For
- Protecting your data with automatic, continous backup
- Retrieving lost data effortlessly
- Adding extra storage space for photos, videos and music
- Securing private or sensitive data
Compatibility
Formatted NTFS
Windows® XP, Windows Vista®, Windows 7
Mac OS® X Tiger®, Leopard®, Snow Leopard™ (requires reformatting)
What's in the box
Ultra-portable hard drive, WD SmartWare software, USB cable, Quick Install Guide.
Backup software you'll really use � WD SmartWare Five great reasons to love it: | ||
1. It's easy - Data backup can be a chore, but it's your family photos, your movies, your music - your life - and it's important to protect it. So we made this software extra easy because we really want you to use it. |
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2. You can see your life safe in one place -
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| 3. It's always on the job - WD SmartWare is always watching your computer, so when you change a file and save it, create new files, add new pictures, movies, or songs, WD SmartWare will instantly back them up. | |
4. You can bring back lost files effortlessly - If you ever accidentally delete an important file, or need to get an earlier version of a file, you can find and retrieve it in seconds with this easy-to-use interface.
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5. You're in control - WD SmartWare software is also a control center for your external drives. From it you can:
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Product Description
See your life safe in one place with WD’s My Passport Essential SE USB drive. It offers maximum storage capacity for all your important files, videos, music, photos. With visual, automatic, continuous backup your data is backed up as soon as it’s changed. Maximum capacity. Maximum style. – The world’s most popular portable drive now features maximum capacity to store all your favorite videos, music, photos, and important files. Still sleek and compact, you can load it up and take it with you anywhere.WD SmartWare – See your life safe in one place.See your backup as it happens – Seeing is believing. Visual backup displays your content in categories and show the progress of your backup.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.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, manage the power settings, 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. [link to] 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. Formatted NTFS for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 , Reformatting required for Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
242 of 260 people found the following review helpful
By The Dybbuk
Size Name:750 GB
The drive is the most stylish (and the smallest) of all WD drives, and as all of their portables are, very reliable. Now quickly for the two issues many people mention:
1. The cable. Everyone relax, it's a standard micro USB. Yes, I wish it was a standard USB, but it's not such a big deal, micro USB is quickly becoming a standard too.
2. The CD software. Even on Amazon pages you can find solutions to disable this crap. I have no idea what WD was thinking - I get the "pre-installed" thing for newbies, but the lack of uninstall? Anyway, I did what any sane person should do: went to WD's page for the drive, checked the knowledge base, and guess what, the answers are there (including simpler solutions that the ones posted on Amazon). Also, worth mentioning is this little note: "In the future, WD will offer a VCD removal tool for those users that do not want to use the software.". GOOD. Better late than never, I guess.
To sum it up: don't let the cable/soft thingy get in the way. It is the best high capacity portable drive in the world. I have 15 of these, including first generation 40GB, and they are all just great.
1. The cable. Everyone relax, it's a standard micro USB. Yes, I wish it was a standard USB, but it's not such a big deal, micro USB is quickly becoming a standard too.
2. The CD software. Even on Amazon pages you can find solutions to disable this crap. I have no idea what WD was thinking - I get the "pre-installed" thing for newbies, but the lack of uninstall? Anyway, I did what any sane person should do: went to WD's page for the drive, checked the knowledge base, and guess what, the answers are there (including simpler solutions that the ones posted on Amazon). Also, worth mentioning is this little note: "In the future, WD will offer a VCD removal tool for those users that do not want to use the software.". GOOD. Better late than never, I guess.
To sum it up: don't let the cable/soft thingy get in the way. It is the best high capacity portable drive in the world. I have 15 of these, including first generation 40GB, and they are all just great.
114 of 120 people found the following review helpful
Size Name:1 TB
EDIT: DUE TO A NUMBER OF REQUESTS FOR PICTURES OF THESE DRIVES TAKEN APART, SEE THE FOLLOWING LINKS:
[…]
My line of work requires that I have a lot of disk space to hold my data. I'm not talking about 20GB of software or files, but rather 450-600GB vmdk virtual disks used to keep a snapshot of our client VMWare environments; so over the last 2 years, I accumulated over 15 USB external drives that averaged 500GB in size. I required the external USB powered drives because I travel a lot and often run these images when I'm on battery power. I've run out of space so badly that my laptop lid is covered with Velcro so that most of these drives can stay affixed to my work environment..... You bet I received tons of grief from my coworkers, especially considering I used to work at EMC2, which manufactures huge Storage Arrays that go in Data Centers. I just couldn't figure out a way to get one of those velcro'd to my laptop lid, otherwise I'd be set!
So, that covers "why" I need these drives, and what my main requirements are: USB Powered, Largest on the market to consolidate smaller ones, and as small as possible as it relates to physical space it takes up in my laptop bag.
These drives are the largest on the market that are self-powered from a single USB port, which is why these are a good candidate for my needs. While I realize everyone is frustrated with the USB cord being a micro USB rather than a traditional 5 pin USB that is commonly used on today's digital cameras to sync, for me that was not a big deal at all. My Plantronics Bluetooth headset uses the Micro USB, as does my Griffin iPhone charging pack, so I was no stranger to Micro USBs. These drives allowed me to go from 12-15 500GB drives down to 5 of these 1TB drives, with the excess 1TB that makes up the difference between all my old 500GB drives and the new 1TB drives being duplicate files across the smaller drives that were identified once I was able to run Deduplication software over the holidays this year.
Now that I've had these drives for a little over a month, I can tell you what I don't like about them, so that you can make up your own mind as to the importance that they have on your overall requirements from a drive. First off, everyone griped about the software auto starting when they plugged it in, but I always avoid double clicking on the drive letter in Windows Explorer and prefer to right click and either choose "Explore" or "Open File Location". That allows me to view the folder structure before I format the drive to the File System of my choice.
A word of caution on these drives, which someone else mentioned as well, and that is the drivers for it do NOT auto install FROM the new drive OR from Windows itself. It is not recognized and you will start to get messages saying the drive can run faster under USB 2.0, which is happening because you need to manually go into device manager, right click on the device named "WD SES Device" that is identified as missing its drivers, and select update drivers. Now for the tricky part. You then need to choose to go find the file by browsing your PC for drivers, and these new drivers are located in the CD ROM drive mapping that was added to your PC when you plugged this new drive into your USB port. It will have a CD icon under Removable Storage, be named "WD SmartWare", and have UDF underneath the Smartware word. You will need to dig a bit to find the inf for the drive, so here is the path that it's mapped to on my laptop, and all you'll have to do is change my E Drive with whatever yours is mapped to (E:\Extras\WD SES Device Driver). This should get you squared away, but REMEMBER TO COPY THIS FOLDER OFF TO ANOTHER PC OR DRIVE BECAUSE ONCE YOU FORMAT THE DRIVE, THIS GOES AWAY, AND SO DOES YOUR ABILITY TO EASILY FIND THE DRIVERS. I DOWNLOADED A DRIVER FROM THE WD SITE THAT WAS NEWER THAN THIS ONE, AND IT PLAGUED MY LAPTOP PERFORMANCE, SO I HAVE STUCK WITH THE ORIGINAL RTM DRIVERS.
Another word of caution is the opening in the drive itself where the micro usb cable plugs into on the drive is ridiculously fragile. A month in and after almost filling one of these TB drives up, the light stopped flashing on the side, I no longer heard the drive power on and start spinning, nor was it being recognized by my laptop. I about crapped myself because I've already been thru hell a year ago when I lost 1.5TB of client data that I had sitting on a Seagate 1.5TB 3.5" SATA hard drive which had a flaw in its firmware where it would wipe your existing partitions clean off the drive AND write 0's in the place of the data that used to reside on the drive and then corrupted the firmware itself IF AND ONLY IF you happened to connect that Seagate drive to a Dell PC that also had a conflict with it. So, all in all, I was pretty frustrated thinking I had lost another drive. But, there was another option. I talked to WD and they said they'd replace the drive for me, but I was obviously more concerned with the data on it. The drive was cheap enough to replace if it ever came to that. So WD sent me a new drive, and in the meantime, I took this drive apart to see if I could fix it myself or at least identify what happened to make it become a paper weight. Once I got the drive opened, it was quite interesting. These are not 2.5" SATA drives like all the other usb powered drives..... It's a 2.5 or maybe even a 2.75" drive, but you can't take it out of the plastic case it's in and say slide it into your laptop, which is what I tried to do the first day I got these drives, so this was actually my second time under the hood of the drive cases.
Now, there was something I was very stoked about which was the fact that these drives use a very similar circuitry design that their larger cousin uses in the 3.5" SATA drive in that you can unscrew about 6-8 hex screws and take off the green circuit board that physically connects the SATA pins to the hard drive itself. This is done intentionally as opposed to permanently affixing the SATA connector to the drive, because if the SATA pins break off, which I've seen happen numerous times before, the drive is dead and so is the data on it. With the board having the ability to be exchanged out, one for one, the drive powers up instantly. So in my case with this 1TB USB drive, the female connector was somehow damaged by the useless cables they provided because they kept falling out at an angle and must have bent one of the 5 pins that are required to power this drive. So on these drives, instead of the green circuit board having a SATA connector on it like 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives use, this drive has the female end of the micro USB connection. What I did was take off the board that had the bad female connector and replaced it with the board from the new 1TB drive that arrived from WD. Once I did that, the drive powered up and hasn't had a hiccup since, which was over a week ago. If you ever get into trouble with something like this on these drives, don't be so quick to give up because there is usually an option available, but it was a bummer I had to even deal with this in the first place.
Lastly, and probably the most important comment I wanted to make was how absolutely flimsy the micro usb cords are that were provided with the drives, and how I've already had to return one of the 5 because the cord kept coming out while I was using the drive running VMs, and it eventually corrupted my data because of the constant on off on off on off on off on all day long. However, I am very pleased to say that I have found a total workaround for this and no longer have a problem with the cord falling out. I invested in new micro USB cords from Monster and they fit very tightly, have never come out, and I have seen a huge improvement in IO performance from these drives, which is an even bigger win. I know some of you will feel that for the price of the drive, working cables should be expected. And I agree, but they aren't practical, and it was worth the investment of $15-$20 per cable to ensure I didn't have to go through losing another drive. I actually feel these drives are a complete steal for being the only 1TB usb powered drive on the market (at the time of this review) and I have no regrets with them even after having to get new cables for them.
[…]
I know this is quite long, and I really only planned to add feedback regarding the USB cords, but once I started typing, I figured I'd help someone out who will undoubtedly run into the same situation I did but get through it without the stress and headaches! If you need pictures of what the inside looks like, email me and I can get them to you.
[…]
[…]
My line of work requires that I have a lot of disk space to hold my data. I'm not talking about 20GB of software or files, but rather 450-600GB vmdk virtual disks used to keep a snapshot of our client VMWare environments; so over the last 2 years, I accumulated over 15 USB external drives that averaged 500GB in size. I required the external USB powered drives because I travel a lot and often run these images when I'm on battery power. I've run out of space so badly that my laptop lid is covered with Velcro so that most of these drives can stay affixed to my work environment..... You bet I received tons of grief from my coworkers, especially considering I used to work at EMC2, which manufactures huge Storage Arrays that go in Data Centers. I just couldn't figure out a way to get one of those velcro'd to my laptop lid, otherwise I'd be set!
So, that covers "why" I need these drives, and what my main requirements are: USB Powered, Largest on the market to consolidate smaller ones, and as small as possible as it relates to physical space it takes up in my laptop bag.
These drives are the largest on the market that are self-powered from a single USB port, which is why these are a good candidate for my needs. While I realize everyone is frustrated with the USB cord being a micro USB rather than a traditional 5 pin USB that is commonly used on today's digital cameras to sync, for me that was not a big deal at all. My Plantronics Bluetooth headset uses the Micro USB, as does my Griffin iPhone charging pack, so I was no stranger to Micro USBs. These drives allowed me to go from 12-15 500GB drives down to 5 of these 1TB drives, with the excess 1TB that makes up the difference between all my old 500GB drives and the new 1TB drives being duplicate files across the smaller drives that were identified once I was able to run Deduplication software over the holidays this year.
Now that I've had these drives for a little over a month, I can tell you what I don't like about them, so that you can make up your own mind as to the importance that they have on your overall requirements from a drive. First off, everyone griped about the software auto starting when they plugged it in, but I always avoid double clicking on the drive letter in Windows Explorer and prefer to right click and either choose "Explore" or "Open File Location". That allows me to view the folder structure before I format the drive to the File System of my choice.
A word of caution on these drives, which someone else mentioned as well, and that is the drivers for it do NOT auto install FROM the new drive OR from Windows itself. It is not recognized and you will start to get messages saying the drive can run faster under USB 2.0, which is happening because you need to manually go into device manager, right click on the device named "WD SES Device" that is identified as missing its drivers, and select update drivers. Now for the tricky part. You then need to choose to go find the file by browsing your PC for drivers, and these new drivers are located in the CD ROM drive mapping that was added to your PC when you plugged this new drive into your USB port. It will have a CD icon under Removable Storage, be named "WD SmartWare", and have UDF underneath the Smartware word. You will need to dig a bit to find the inf for the drive, so here is the path that it's mapped to on my laptop, and all you'll have to do is change my E Drive with whatever yours is mapped to (E:\Extras\WD SES Device Driver). This should get you squared away, but REMEMBER TO COPY THIS FOLDER OFF TO ANOTHER PC OR DRIVE BECAUSE ONCE YOU FORMAT THE DRIVE, THIS GOES AWAY, AND SO DOES YOUR ABILITY TO EASILY FIND THE DRIVERS. I DOWNLOADED A DRIVER FROM THE WD SITE THAT WAS NEWER THAN THIS ONE, AND IT PLAGUED MY LAPTOP PERFORMANCE, SO I HAVE STUCK WITH THE ORIGINAL RTM DRIVERS.
Another word of caution is the opening in the drive itself where the micro usb cable plugs into on the drive is ridiculously fragile. A month in and after almost filling one of these TB drives up, the light stopped flashing on the side, I no longer heard the drive power on and start spinning, nor was it being recognized by my laptop. I about crapped myself because I've already been thru hell a year ago when I lost 1.5TB of client data that I had sitting on a Seagate 1.5TB 3.5" SATA hard drive which had a flaw in its firmware where it would wipe your existing partitions clean off the drive AND write 0's in the place of the data that used to reside on the drive and then corrupted the firmware itself IF AND ONLY IF you happened to connect that Seagate drive to a Dell PC that also had a conflict with it. So, all in all, I was pretty frustrated thinking I had lost another drive. But, there was another option. I talked to WD and they said they'd replace the drive for me, but I was obviously more concerned with the data on it. The drive was cheap enough to replace if it ever came to that. So WD sent me a new drive, and in the meantime, I took this drive apart to see if I could fix it myself or at least identify what happened to make it become a paper weight. Once I got the drive opened, it was quite interesting. These are not 2.5" SATA drives like all the other usb powered drives..... It's a 2.5 or maybe even a 2.75" drive, but you can't take it out of the plastic case it's in and say slide it into your laptop, which is what I tried to do the first day I got these drives, so this was actually my second time under the hood of the drive cases.
Now, there was something I was very stoked about which was the fact that these drives use a very similar circuitry design that their larger cousin uses in the 3.5" SATA drive in that you can unscrew about 6-8 hex screws and take off the green circuit board that physically connects the SATA pins to the hard drive itself. This is done intentionally as opposed to permanently affixing the SATA connector to the drive, because if the SATA pins break off, which I've seen happen numerous times before, the drive is dead and so is the data on it. With the board having the ability to be exchanged out, one for one, the drive powers up instantly. So in my case with this 1TB USB drive, the female connector was somehow damaged by the useless cables they provided because they kept falling out at an angle and must have bent one of the 5 pins that are required to power this drive. So on these drives, instead of the green circuit board having a SATA connector on it like 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives use, this drive has the female end of the micro USB connection. What I did was take off the board that had the bad female connector and replaced it with the board from the new 1TB drive that arrived from WD. Once I did that, the drive powered up and hasn't had a hiccup since, which was over a week ago. If you ever get into trouble with something like this on these drives, don't be so quick to give up because there is usually an option available, but it was a bummer I had to even deal with this in the first place.
Lastly, and probably the most important comment I wanted to make was how absolutely flimsy the micro usb cords are that were provided with the drives, and how I've already had to return one of the 5 because the cord kept coming out while I was using the drive running VMs, and it eventually corrupted my data because of the constant on off on off on off on off on all day long. However, I am very pleased to say that I have found a total workaround for this and no longer have a problem with the cord falling out. I invested in new micro USB cords from Monster and they fit very tightly, have never come out, and I have seen a huge improvement in IO performance from these drives, which is an even bigger win. I know some of you will feel that for the price of the drive, working cables should be expected. And I agree, but they aren't practical, and it was worth the investment of $15-$20 per cable to ensure I didn't have to go through losing another drive. I actually feel these drives are a complete steal for being the only 1TB usb powered drive on the market (at the time of this review) and I have no regrets with them even after having to get new cables for them.
[…]
I know this is quite long, and I really only planned to add feedback regarding the USB cords, but once I started typing, I figured I'd help someone out who will undoubtedly run into the same situation I did but get through it without the stress and headaches! If you need pictures of what the inside looks like, email me and I can get them to you.
[…]
177 of 199 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
WD tried & failed to fix 2 serious issues. Reduced from 5 to 2 stars.
December 11, 2009
Size Name:1 TB
Feb 2010 update (original review follows)...
After months of negotiating with Western Digital and trying to work through two serious design flaws with this drive, and after experiencing a horribly botched attempt to correct the problem (I still don't have a working drive...Even new shipments in Feb 2010 have the same problem!!), I am reducing the user rating from 5 to 2 stars. It is truly a pitty, because if it weren't for these two KILLER problems, this would be one superb product with a terrific hardware platform.
As author of the leading review and most recommended user tip, I really struggled with this rating. I don't relish in damaging WDs reputation - even in my little corner of influence. But recently, WD has made the problems worse by sending their loyal customers on a wild goose chase. I can no longer recommend the My Passport Essential SE drives. This is the 2nd time that I have changed the rating for this product line. I have also changed the title of the original review --
Original Title: "WD has fixed BOTH issues that raised such ire"
New Title: "WD tried & failed to fix 2 serious issues. Reduced from 5 to 2 stars"
For complete details about WD attempts to correct the nightmare of this model, see my response to Cuppa on page 2 (Feb 16, 2010). Here is my original review, which although critical of initial marketing decisions had awarded the prouct 5 stars...
_____________
What were the product managers at Western Digital thinking?! How could any vendor get it SO-O-O very wrong in this enlightened consumer era?...
1. Bloatware / Crapware -FIXED (but see Feb 15 update)
WD tried to UN-commoditize their new My Passport SE drives by forcing a software application (and an annoying chain of Windows events) on anyone who connects the new SE series of high-capacity external drives (750GB and 1TB editions of their popular 2.5" external drives). Let's face it! WD is a high-end manufacturer. Their product needn't be distinguished by forced aps that treat customers like sheep (and like idiots!). The My Passport SE series is sufficiently distinguished by style, hardware encryption, value, and durability. No need to fill it with crapware.
Anyway, I have given WD full credit (restoring 5 stars), for their November decision to fully back down by offering a utility to hide the extra partition and restore standardized operation. The other peeve of early reviewers had to do with the cable. Some reviewers claimed that WD had switched to a proprietary scheme. Not so! But they did make the move to a Micro-USB interface instead of the earlier Mini-USB. It was inevitable. The switch has already swept through the phone industry (Nokia, Motorola, LG, Novatel... The list goes on). Power supply makers are all redoing their wares with this new smaller connector. Many power suppliers simply have a standard PC-USB connector on the housing. Simply attach whatever pig-tail cable suits your hardware.
2. USB Cable -FIXED (but see Feb 15 update)
Western Digital had packaged a faulty USB cable with October shipments of the My Passport SE series drives. I know that they are sill in stock at retailers because I received the faulty cable in December. Other buyers at my company recieved them in Jan-Feb 2010. The flakey cables are shipped with drive Part# beginning WDBAB... To distinguish the newer cable, look for the photos and explanation from other reviewers. WD will replace the early USB cable upon request. Unfortunately, it may take a few phone calls. The support staff have a memo about the problem, but they may not know how to locate it. I wonder if WD is proactively reaching out to registered owners (?!).
For both issues #1 and #2, the bottom line is that WD listens to customers and to these reviews. For a brand new product, I am cutting them some slack. I consider both problems to be reasonably and promptly addressed.
3. Features
Sans the bloatware (some people like it and some do not), the drive has one very cool feature: 128 bit hardware encryption. Don't even think about not using it. Your data is yours alone. Keep it that way. Just be sure that you escrow the key and give it to someone you love. Otherwise, someday your data will be unrecoverable forever under several very likely scenarios.
4. Cost
Amazon and B&H Video are price leaders on this model. They beat other reputable retailers by $20~25. As of Febuary 2010 - depending upon daily fluctuation & temporary promotions - the 1TB model sells for $179-195, or just That's 18c per GB. Larger format 3.5" external drives are faster and about half the cost per GB. But they are larger than a paper back book and require external power.
5. Regarding other recent Geek questions:
a) The drive is 5400 RPM and easily powered by a single USB connector. It does not require a 2-headed cable for USB hubs within spec.
b) Drive makers introduce ever higher capacity external drives before they offer similar models as an upgrade/replacements component to your notebook PC. Therefore, some individuals will purchase the latest external drive with an intention to REMOVE it from the drive housing (and the USB interface), and then drop it into their laptop PC. But...
But unlike other models, this drive cannot be used to replace the internal drive within a notebook PC -- not even if you have the full 12mm height. Unlike other WD My Passport drives, the drive unit within the external housing does *NOT* have a standard SATA interface! This time, WD created a proprietary internal spec to squeeze the drive into an even smaller external form.
Ellery's Byline:
I frequently clarify selected tech reviews & forums. You may write to me: Ellery (at) starbus (dot) com
After months of negotiating with Western Digital and trying to work through two serious design flaws with this drive, and after experiencing a horribly botched attempt to correct the problem (I still don't have a working drive...Even new shipments in Feb 2010 have the same problem!!), I am reducing the user rating from 5 to 2 stars. It is truly a pitty, because if it weren't for these two KILLER problems, this would be one superb product with a terrific hardware platform.
As author of the leading review and most recommended user tip, I really struggled with this rating. I don't relish in damaging WDs reputation - even in my little corner of influence. But recently, WD has made the problems worse by sending their loyal customers on a wild goose chase. I can no longer recommend the My Passport Essential SE drives. This is the 2nd time that I have changed the rating for this product line. I have also changed the title of the original review --
Original Title: "WD has fixed BOTH issues that raised such ire"
New Title: "WD tried & failed to fix 2 serious issues. Reduced from 5 to 2 stars"
For complete details about WD attempts to correct the nightmare of this model, see my response to Cuppa on page 2 (Feb 16, 2010). Here is my original review, which although critical of initial marketing decisions had awarded the prouct 5 stars...
_____________
What were the product managers at Western Digital thinking?! How could any vendor get it SO-O-O very wrong in this enlightened consumer era?...
1. Bloatware / Crapware -FIXED (but see Feb 15 update)
WD tried to UN-commoditize their new My Passport SE drives by forcing a software application (and an annoying chain of Windows events) on anyone who connects the new SE series of high-capacity external drives (750GB and 1TB editions of their popular 2.5" external drives). Let's face it! WD is a high-end manufacturer. Their product needn't be distinguished by forced aps that treat customers like sheep (and like idiots!). The My Passport SE series is sufficiently distinguished by style, hardware encryption, value, and durability. No need to fill it with crapware.
Anyway, I have given WD full credit (restoring 5 stars), for their November decision to fully back down by offering a utility to hide the extra partition and restore standardized operation. The other peeve of early reviewers had to do with the cable. Some reviewers claimed that WD had switched to a proprietary scheme. Not so! But they did make the move to a Micro-USB interface instead of the earlier Mini-USB. It was inevitable. The switch has already swept through the phone industry (Nokia, Motorola, LG, Novatel... The list goes on). Power supply makers are all redoing their wares with this new smaller connector. Many power suppliers simply have a standard PC-USB connector on the housing. Simply attach whatever pig-tail cable suits your hardware.
2. USB Cable -FIXED (but see Feb 15 update)
Western Digital had packaged a faulty USB cable with October shipments of the My Passport SE series drives. I know that they are sill in stock at retailers because I received the faulty cable in December. Other buyers at my company recieved them in Jan-Feb 2010. The flakey cables are shipped with drive Part# beginning WDBAB... To distinguish the newer cable, look for the photos and explanation from other reviewers. WD will replace the early USB cable upon request. Unfortunately, it may take a few phone calls. The support staff have a memo about the problem, but they may not know how to locate it. I wonder if WD is proactively reaching out to registered owners (?!).
For both issues #1 and #2, the bottom line is that WD listens to customers and to these reviews. For a brand new product, I am cutting them some slack. I consider both problems to be reasonably and promptly addressed.
3. Features
Sans the bloatware (some people like it and some do not), the drive has one very cool feature: 128 bit hardware encryption. Don't even think about not using it. Your data is yours alone. Keep it that way. Just be sure that you escrow the key and give it to someone you love. Otherwise, someday your data will be unrecoverable forever under several very likely scenarios.
4. Cost
Amazon and B&H Video are price leaders on this model. They beat other reputable retailers by $20~25. As of Febuary 2010 - depending upon daily fluctuation & temporary promotions - the 1TB model sells for $179-195, or just That's 18c per GB. Larger format 3.5" external drives are faster and about half the cost per GB. But they are larger than a paper back book and require external power.
5. Regarding other recent Geek questions:
a) The drive is 5400 RPM and easily powered by a single USB connector. It does not require a 2-headed cable for USB hubs within spec.
b) Drive makers introduce ever higher capacity external drives before they offer similar models as an upgrade/replacements component to your notebook PC. Therefore, some individuals will purchase the latest external drive with an intention to REMOVE it from the drive housing (and the USB interface), and then drop it into their laptop PC. But...
But unlike other models, this drive cannot be used to replace the internal drive within a notebook PC -- not even if you have the full 12mm height. Unlike other WD My Passport drives, the drive unit within the external housing does *NOT* have a standard SATA interface! This time, WD created a proprietary internal spec to squeeze the drive into an even smaller external form.
Ellery's Byline:
I frequently clarify selected tech reviews & forums. You may write to me: Ellery (at) starbus (dot) com
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