Customer Reviews

It's a great drive in spite of Western Digital's software, NOT because of it.
This is a great little drive! It quickly and easily added 500GB to my MacBook Air once I made some modifications to Western Digital's setup process. The drive powers itself on a single USB port, unlike some other drives that need two. The drive is totally silent, no vibration, and the included dock is decent but the glossy finish looks odd with the matte finish on the drive itself.

The area WD needs to improve is in SOFTWARE. Every single time you plug this drive in, it mounts a virtual CD on the desktop. You can't turn it off with the drive software. To remove it, you literally have to drag the icon to the trash every single time (reformatting the drive doesn't work). It took me 10 mins on Google to find that WD has a utility to unmount it permanently for both Windows and Mac - it's buried within their site. Downloading this utility and running it FINALLY got rid of the CD icon on my desktop. Frustrating!

WD also provides backup software, but it just isn't anywhere as nice as Time Machine on the Mac or the backup solution for Windows 7. There are also drivers you can install to replace the stock icons on the desktop with WD icons showing how much of the drive is being used. These were the least invasive of WD's software, but added no real value to the drive.

That's 3 DIFFERENT pieces of software to configure. To use a USB hard drive. That's about 3 too many, for my tastes!

The status LEDs on the drive itself are a bit wonky too. There are four LEDs to indicate how much drive space has been taken up. One: They ONLY work if you install the WD software, otherwise they just stay dark. Two: Even when they're on, they make zero sense.

You might think with 4 LEDs that as you filled the drive up, they would light (and stay lit)... kind of like filling up a glass with water. The more in the glass, the more LEDs are lit. This is NOT the case. LED 1 is 0%-25%. LED 2 is 25%-50%. You see where this is going. Only a single LED stays lit, and from any more than 6 inches away you can see WHICH LED is lit: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Could have been a neat feature, but again, software killed it.

To make this drive useful and not frustrating I ended up removing ALL Western Digital software from my Mac, reformatting the drive with Disk Utility, giving up on use of the LEDs on the front, and letting Mac OS manage the backups and the drive itself.

Once you remove all trace of Western Digital software, you're left with a normal, small, quiet hard drive that works great for backups and storage, fits in my (small) laptop bag with little weight added, and looks nice!

The drive gets 5 STARS. The software gets 1 STAR.

You will love it or hate it... here's why
You'll hate it... If you're looking for a general purpose portable USB drive. There are smaller, less expensive, and more solidly built drives around. For example Seagate FreeAgent Go 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive ST905003FAA2E1-RK (Black) or SimpleTech by Hitachi Signature Mini 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive FS-U25/500E (Espresso). Also, you *need* to use the cables provided with the drive. That's either the long one that's attached to the cradle (the cradle that will tip over in a stiff breeze and doesn't connect to the drive all that well) or the short (18") cable. You need to use those cables for a couple reasons, first because the disk-side connector is non-standard and because the manual cautions you, several times, to use only those cables. I suspect the requirement to use their cables may have helped motivate their choice of connectors.

You'll love it... If you are not a netbook user and looking for a portable drive that will easily install and connect to your desktop/laptop and include robust and reliable encryption, backup, and restore (let's not forget that part) software. The built-in software isn't as feature rich (read usually confusing) as some dedicated backup programs. However, it does get the job done and is very clear about what is happening. Further, using the supplied high quality cable means you don't have to use an external power supply or tie up two USB ports as you do with some portable drives. Finally, the cradle can be very handy for road warriors who like to capture data from their disk-side machines and use it with their laptops as they travel. This is also when the robust encryption component can be very important.

So, if you need the extra features then the extra cost us justified. If you just want an additional disk to store some DVDs then there are better choices. I didn't feel like writing two reviews so I averaged everything and hope this description will be useful to anyone trying to figure out if this drive is right for them.

Poor marketing communications for a potentially good product
WD is doing a terrible job in marketing the new Passport drives. Things they leave people guessing which should be better communicated:

1. The drive to cable interface is micro-USB, NOT proprietary. This means I can use the cable from my Nokia cell phone and vice versa.
2. The firmware prevents you from deleting factory loaded contents, but later WD issued a firmware update to allow it. One star off for the irritation.
3. The drive IS really much smaller than before. There should be a side-by-side pictorial. This is because the HDD circuit board has USB on-board. Less space, power, reliability, and performance costs than traditional SATA drives with added USB-SATA interface adapter. Minor consequence is being unable to use it internally as a notebook PC drive.
4. 3 year warranty. I'm not sure if this is 3-year drive/1-year other components warranty or full warranty. Seagate disguises their 1 year warranty as a 5-year by charging you for "non-drive" defects after the first year (5-years on the drive/1-year on all components other than the drive).

I wonder what becomes of the tons of returned drives WD/Seagate seems to get recently? From a consumer's point of view, this year's external drive products make little sense.