Best Portable External Hard Drives Reviews

Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB HDD slower compared with same product from other source.The writing speed of this one is considerably slower than the other one I have which is exactly same, though $14 more expensive purchased from other sources.

The writing speed of this one is around 4MB/sec to 5MB/sec, the other one is 19MB/sec to 20MB/sec. This is for my home vista PC.

Watching movies on the drive become discontinuous if I copy a big file to it at the same time.
On the new Linux machine (still usb2.0), they are 20MB/sec and 31MB/sec respectively at the beginning, then this one slow down after a while to 6MB/sec.

After four hours and over 300 GB of data thing took a dump. Won’t let me write anything else to it and will read data sometimes. Will try another one but realy don’t have any confidence in WD. Do not install the software with WD hard drives! But just think of how much data I could have lost if it lasted six hours.

I should research this item more carefully. The only good part is that this small drive hold 1 TB. There is 500 MB wasted that is filled with their bad software. The smartware is slower than normal copy & paste. It drains system resource. You want to get rid of this software due to several issues.

One main issue is that you can’t remove the 500MB of VCD. You can only disable VCD. You can’t use this drive for PS3.

It is not real portable if you need computers with smartware.

Don’t buy any more external WD hard until they fix this issue.

it’s own dual type plug on the drive so no ordinary usb lead will work. You have been warned – don’t loose that bad boy you might end up with a nice little door stop.

The drive is very small (deck of cards-ish) and fast, and given that it’s 1TB, you won’t miss the 20GB of space that is lost right off the bat, such are hard drives. My only issue with this device is that the USB cable that attaches to the drive has a proprietary (non USB) connection at one end. So if you lose it or damage it, you have to order a new one from WD. I would have rather had either a standard USB A-to-B cable, or even an attached cable that retracts into the drive itself, as others offer. That’s my only gripe. I have so far backed up 200 GB with no issues.