Best Portable External Hard Drives Reviews

I Love My Western Digital Products 1TB My Passport.it’s overall very good. good speed, easy to use… Only issue, I cann’t figure out how to use their included software to backup files. excellent product. very easy to use, install software, and no comapability problems. I am running it on win 7 ultimate and am very pleased with the performance…

This portable hard drive does everything you need it to and is very reliable.

Pros:
- Very small/portable for 1TB capacity
- Sleek design
- Quiet and cool
- Subtle indicator light
- USB 3.0 speeds (though I have not tested these since my laptop doesn’t have 3.0)
- Works perfectly fine with USB 2.0

Cons:
- Specific USB 3.0 cable (It can plug into USB 2.0 fine, but the part that plugs into the actual hard drive is different from your standard usb/mini usb cable. However, I’m sure these cables will become more common as USB becomes more prevalent)
- Very short USB cable

I’ve owned and constructed my fair share of external hard drives, and I have to say that I’m impressed with this piece of tech thus far. First of all, 1 TB in such a small form factor is impressive enough. It can fit easily in my back pocket or the front pocket of my backpack, and the case construction seems solid enough to take a few hits. My biggest complaint about HDDs like these is that if you leave the USB cable connected to the device while transporting it around, it’s likely to loosen the connector over time and ruin the USB port on the drive.

That being said, don’t do that and it wont be a problem. I haven’t had this drive long enough to tell if this would happen or not, but the connector seems to be fairly rigidly connected to the case so I’m not worried for now. One thing I do have to note is the short length of the USB 3.0 cable included with the drive. For laptops it’s fine, but if you have a bottom located front side USB port on your computer and want to rest this drive on top of a larger case, you would have to get a longer cord (I was surprised at how expensive this would be). Not enough of an issue to take off any points. Oh yeah, USB 3.0 is great. This thing is quite speedy with a new USB 3.0 sporting mobo. Rock it and love it.

an external hard drive that required no separate power supply, was compact, and had a fairly large capacity (1TB+). This product met all of those requirements. We literally took the drive out of the box, plugged it in (recognized by and compatible with Win7), and approximately 4-6 hours (not sure of exact performance) later had backed up 900+ GB of media (pictures, music, and videos). We are quite pleased with its performance in these respects.

i wanted to use the pre-loaded WD software to automatically back up media files. The problem is that we do not keep media on the C drive — which is the ONLY drive you can have automatically backed up. There is NO way to specify a different drive. So if you are like us and keep files on other drives, you are out of luck…