Customer Reviews

500GB 2.5" USB Drive-Blue

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Between me and my wife we own three WD Passports. I've been waiting for them to finally come out with a 500gb drive and it does not disappoint. It's bus powered for everyone's convenience. Enjoy it. I'm actually debating on buying a second 500gb.

I bought this drive because I saw one that my friend owned. LOVED IT. The software is for people that need to "sink" up their data on multiple computers. I just did not install the software and use the hard drive as an external hard drive. It is wonderful! Small, easy to use. The USB cable is a little short but for most cases that is just fine. I have not tried it with a longer cable yet. I have actually already dropped the drive and it had NO impact. All my data was just fine. I bought a small neoprene case to carry it around and works great. Just can't say enough about this.

Recently, I had to get a new computer, and it came with the newer Windows Vista, instead of the XP I was used to. I had an older portable hard drive, and had a lot of problems with it as far as being able to acccess it. Western Digital has always been a top name in hard drives (I've had several over the years), so I decided to try one of theirs. This drive not only solved all of my problems that I'd had, it was faster by far than my old one. It's small enough to carry around in your pocket, and automatically links up to any computer I plug it into. I've been able to take all my files with me to show pictures to people at work, or my friends, with no problems at all. If you need extra space, or a back-up for your main drive, you can't beat this hard drive for ease of use, speed, or price. Highly recommend!

Okay, it's kinda pretty. Whatever!

I initially bought this to store multi-media files for my Western Digital TV device.

However, it came with the the same excellent idiot-proof back-up software as my 16 GIG Sandisk USB flash drives, except now I can back-up up to 500 GIG. It can back up all of your Outlook items as well as any/all of your HD folders.

It only requires 1 USB interface rather than 2 which some of my other externals require.

Liked it for backing up so much that I bought a red one (so I could tell them apart) for the TV.

Highly recommended at Amazon prices.

Plus you get the sealed retail package with a nice short 18" USB cable. Most geeks probably have 3 - 4 footers cluttering up their spare parts boxes, these are nice to place next to your USB hub and remove when you are done. Or you can leave them attached to charge your cell phone or download from your camera.

Overall experience with price, quality and features, excellent!!!

Barely six months into owning the product - the hard drive crashed!!! And it barely contains a little over 100gb! I have a 250gb with WD as well, for two years now, and it hasn't crashed! I don't recommend this new generation of WD Passports.

The drive worked perfectly out of the box with my mac and windows machines. I've had it for a month and so far, no problems. It is USB powered and fits in my shirt pocket along with its 18" cable (when detached and folded). To me it is about 80% as convenient as a flash drive with many times the capacity (and far less probability of my losing it). I can't judge the speed, but it seems fast enough for backups and routine file transfers. I've played video clips and music files from the drive with no interruptions. The outside case is made of what looks like the high impact plastic used in children's toys. The case seems well constructed, however, with solidly bonded seams. So, it seems like a good buy.

First, let me say that I am very picky about my electronics. I've owned this hard drive for over a year now and it does everything as expected. It's quick and I have never had any problems with it. I would definitely recommend this hard drive for someone. In fact, I recently purchased the newer 750 GB version for my brother for Christmas. For it's value, I would say that it is underpriced. Again, would definitely recommend.

I feel bad giving 2 stars, but I'm of the mind that this external hard-drive has tried to make things TOO easy on the user. Before you think I'm a fool, let me explain...

When you back up, it goes out and selects what to back up (based on file extensions I suppose). However, there's no real way to ensure that it is grabbing EXACTLY what you want backed up. You can only tell it to back up "Pictures" or "Music" or whatever. You can't see the directories that it's pulling from.

Browsing the drive itself to confirm what has been backed up is of little help. For some reason mine currently has 12 folders, each with names like "1E79E695AEFA4A248F06F392E92C9DFE". Opening these folders, you can see some of the familiarity of the Windows directory structure, but it seems to put C:\users\????\Pictures under one of the crazy named folders and C:\users\????\Music under another, while splitting up C:\users\????\Desktop into several. My last hard-drive had everything for one computer under the same directory and had not re-organized the directory structure. My only hope for this drive is that the crazy directories and re-organization is caused by the drive's ability to store up to 5 versions of the same file, otherwise the programmers must just be completely off their rockers.

Also, I backed up once under one user and then backed up a second time under another, and I believe, but am not positive, that it picked up all the second users files the second time. Who knows what else it is missing?

I haven't tried restoring and I have no fricking idea what will happen if I try to do that using the software included. I would probably just wade through the crazy directories to do it myself manually.

Thinking about it, I kind of want to just copy files to the thing manually as well. I don't care about the ability to copy any files that have been added or changed if I don't actually trust it to get everything.

In summary, the drive is small, quiet and comes with a little case, but if you know anything about computers, you will find the software it comes with very frustrating.

The blue color looks really nice. It comes with FAT32 format but I immediately formated it to NTFS. I am not sure whether the synchronization capability will work with this new format. Other than that it is very light and it works great with XP, Vista and even Linux. I recommend this product to everybody.

Now, if you like all of your products to be spotless, find something else, because this one gets minor scratches easily on the blue cover. Nothing major, but for some it can be a little frustrating.

The Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive WDMEB5000TN was reasonably priced and easy to set up and use to back up my old computer. However, when I went to copy the backup to my new computer, it gave the appearance of transferring everything without actually doing so. For reasons I still don't know, although all folder names copied to the new computer, not all the files within the folders did even though they were there on the Passport. The drive gave some vague alert about not all files copying but did not specify which ones or how many. Only after a few weeks on the new computer did I determine what did not transfer from the Passport (and it is possible there are still files missing but nothing I have needed). On the positive side, the Passport is easy to use for just dragging and dropping files, which is how I finally got back the files that didn't transfer using the backup software, and at 500 GB it is probably all I'll ever need for quite some time. As a 2.5" drive, it does not require a separate power source. This means, however, that it will be slower than a 3.5" drive that plugs in to the wall, but for now portability and a small footprint are more important to me than speed and the bulk that goes with it.