The Best External Hard Drive Or Not?I bought this external hard drive. Prior to purchasing I went to the WD site and downloaded the pdf manual to familiarize myself. Glad I did because the monkey-see-monkey-do two drawing instructions (sic) were insulting and insufficient. (Yes, the My Passport does have the pdf in its memory for access.) It seemed ‘doable’ but not being a computer wiz … I took a gamble and bought it. Slick looking, nice size; perfect for moving files from PC to PC. I attempted to load the driver on my home PC. I plugged it in, made sure that it registered on My Computer, canceled the ‘auto wizard’ and opened my ‘E’ drive where My Passport resided; all according to instructions. It opened and revealed three options as to what kind of back up (driver) I wished to load.
I chose the one that seemed the simplest but not really knowing what they really were. The pdf manual did not enlighten. It went to the 1 minute mark and then quit. Tried several times. Then I tried it on my PC at work. The driver loaded ok and everything seemed ok. I stopped the copying of data and opened the My Passport HD which seemed a bit confusing. Lots of confusion screens with My Passport but then again I am not a computer whiz. A few of my files were there. OK.
Fine. Then I attempted to delete the files as one is apt to do. They wouldn’t delete. Fortunately I didn’t load anything truly important or I’d be exceedingly miffed. Something is not right with this portable hard drive. (Loading seems to be a crap shoot as to what is copied when.) I’ve heard that there is a 10% failure rate with external drives. Maybe my experience with this HD makes up the 10%. Not sure that I wanted to go through all this again with an exchange and asked for a refund.
Maybe this is naive of me but all I want is a portable hard drive that is plug-n-play like many (but not all!) memory sticks. I want to be able to select the files that I want to copy without playing eenie meenie having to decide what kind of storage I want. In simple words: 1) plug-n-play 2)USB 3) simple password entry and verification 4)memory. That’s it. Nothing more. (Any suggestions please let me know.)
When I purchased the 1 Tb version of this drive I expected It to work with my MacBook Pro that I use for school work. I was going to use it to store all of my movies that I have ripped onto my gaming desktop, for viewing anywhere. It writes to the drive from my windows desktop perfectly, averaging at around 150 mbps, (I have usb 3.0) but When I plug it into a mac computer, and I have tried it on multiple macintosh computers, I can not even write anything. It reads fine, and I can watch my anime to my hearts content, but if I try to load some files for transfer to someone else’s computer it refuses to copy. I am happy with the read and write speeds otherwise, and would recommend this product if you do not own a mac.
I still use this external hard drive, but have to load everything from my desktop.
