Best Portable External Hard Drives Reviews

This new Western Digital external USB drive is small, relatively lightweight, and speedy. It is designed to operate at USB 3.0 speeds, but until we all are able to make that hardware shift with new computers, we can still enjoy here a very large storage capacity in a small and attractive unit. Here’s my feedback based on my own experience with the drive:

Pros
+ Excellent transfer speeds at USB 2.0 (the device does same faster than my previous USB external drives)
+ Small form factor
+ Attractive design
+ No need for dual USB connections to make the drive work (some previous drives required this for power reasons, and it could be a real hassle at times)
+ Inexpensive (compared to previous models)
+ High capacity (you can get this in 1 Terabyte size, which is great)
+ Pre-formatted with NTSF (yea! No more multi-hour formatting before you can use the drive! However, if you are a Mac user, you will have to reformat)
+ No forced to use the included WD backup and encryption software if you don’t want to

Cons
- Provided cable is a tad short (this could conceivably be a “Pro”,” however, depending on your needs)
- Pricing differences based on color choice
- No drive pouch or soft case provided

The drive is fine and was fast, reliable and tough until I made the mistake of installing the included back-up software.

I’m in the process of removing this software because it rendered my computer almost unusable. I don’t have the fastest or newest but it’s a dual 3.2 GHz processor with 8 Gb of RAM running Vista Pro and the “WDSmartWare” software has almost ground it to a standstill. The software is supposed to run in the background and keep track of changes to files for continuous backups. Instead it’s chewing up 40-60% of the available processor cycles. This is after the initial back-up which I ran overnight and neither the WD or my internal drive is anywhere near full.

Fine drive if you just want storage, but whatever you do don’t let it install the included vampire like code. It will bleed you to death.

UPDATE – just to confirm it was in fact the “WDSmartWare” software – I uninstalled and everything is back to normal. Program load times, response times and file saves are about five times faster than they were a few hours ago with the “WDSmartWare” software still installed.

I save MP3 audio books. The CDs that I was using were going bad. I needed something which to move all the books.

It didn’t take a long as I thought it would. Easy to do. Easy to access after the move…MUCH easier than the CDs.

Down side: I filled the 1T drive. Now, I have to get another for my 1960-70-80s MP3 Music CDs !!! And the ones I brought back from Vienna that you can’t get here…can’t loose those!!!!

Works great and easy!