Best Portable External Hard Drives Reviews

The Most Helpful Reviews of Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 3.0/2.0 Ultra Portable External Hard Drive.

I was very excited when I received this and saw the size of the package and the sleekness of the drive for a 1TB small form factor storage solution. Unfortunately, that’s where the happiness ends. The drive itself caused nothing but problems and didn’t work properly from the beginning. Took me a while to realize that the drive was the cause, but my whole system would slow to a crawl while the drive was connected. As soon as the drive was unplugged, everything began working normally again. Almost completely unresponsive, wouldn’t re-format properly, generally just an IT nightmare. Tried it on multiple computers with the same results. Sending it back and going with a different brand. Very disappointed in WD with this one…

There is not much to say about this sleek external usb hard disk, the design is minimalist. It is fast, and quiet. In our offices the WD My Passport series has been working flawlessly, I expect the same from this one. My only complain is that the bundled USB cable is a bit short, a couple extra inches is something I would have appreciated.

the transfer speed (copying from my iMac to the drive) slowed down considerably — normally it takes about a minute to copy 1 GB; this suddenly slowed to about 2 hours (!!) to copy 1 GB. I have many other 320GB WD external drives, all of which work fine. Then, 6 months after owning this drive, my computer stopped recognizing it altogether. Don’t bother.

The most important attractive thing about this hard disk is the size, i’ve never seen a portable hard disk this tiny size before, besides this it is beautiful to the eye, the case is rounded and has a shiny polished finish. it’s really beatiful. Talking about the speed, i don’t know what were the “problem” but i needed to backup about 450 gb from my two months old i5 2.6 ghz, 4 Gb ram , windows 7, , usb 2.0 laptop and this process took more than 10 hours with a 10 to 14 mbps rate. Most of the files were between 700 mb and 2 gb each one, i don’t know why it took so long. bottom line this is a great product, maybe with an usb 3.0 laptop or pc upgrade this hard drive will be faster.

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.

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.