It was time to create fresh backup of my laptop, so I got this blue, 500GB WD drive because it was one of the cheapest and I know the manufacturer (used their products before).
The drive is definitely the smallest 2.5 inch portable drive I have ever seen personally. It was the first USB 3.0 device I have purchased, so discovering new, wider USB 3.0 connector on the drive side was a surprise to me. Please note that that the larger plug on the cable (the one you insert into the computer) is also USB 3.0, but fortunately it fits into any USB socket. If your computer does not have USB 3.0 hardware, you can use regular 'micro-USB' cable to connect: just plug it into the wider of the two sections of the socket in the drive.
First backup with the drive was successful, but lengthy as usual. I'm going to buy USB 3.0 express card for my laptop to speed up the process in the future.
One note about the software that comes with the drive - it is horrible! While my hardware experience with WD drives was OK in the past, their software was always of questionable quality. I decided to give it another try after 3 year break, but I had to uninstall and undo some damage manually pretty quickly. I have requested not to install backup part of the software (I'm using operating system facilities to backup), but the software installed 'shadow copy' and some other resident software on my machine anyway. Later on the software suggested firmware update, but could not detect the drive during update!. The worst offense was the change of drive letters on my machine: I have main hard drive with two partitions, DVD drive and flash drive - WD software stole D: letter drive from my DVD drive and turned it into G: drive. Of course uninstalling the software did not return the correct drive order, so I had to do it myself. Conclusion: DO NOT INSTALL THE SOFTWARE THAT COMES WITH THE DRIVE - only the driver that is required on Windows to avoid pop ups when the drive is connected. Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 3.0/2.0 Portable External Hard Drive (Midnight Black)
This thing ships with pre-installed backup software, including some functionality called "VCD". Problem is, I didn't want any of this stuff because I'm not interested in using the drive for backup/restore purposes. I just wanted a hard drive external to my computer with lots of capacity for holding music, photos, and video.
Unfortunately, the way WD has configured this drive, it's almost impossible to use it the way I want to use it. It shows up in "My Computer" on my Windows 7 machine as a CD drive with software that can be run, and zero storage capacity. It does NOT show up as one of the hard disks. Therefore, basic "disk drive" tasks such as saving files to it are proving impossible.
So far, I have spent 2 hours and several visits to WD's web site trying to figure out how to get rid of the unwanted backup software and pre-configured rubbish, so that I can just put my media files on the stupid thing. I've repeatedly rebooted my system, unplugged and reconnected the drive, etc., and still don't have a simple working hard disk. As of this moment, it's still not working properly for me.
I have used external hard drives before and had success with both the bundled backup software that comes with some drives and other software that I have acquired on my own, such as SyncToy. However, what comes with this Passport is below terrible, even to the point that I question its legitimacy.
First of all, this software cannot be removed from the drive it came on. Secondly, it does not ask you what files you want to back up; instead, it automatically finds what most people would want to back up (music, photos, the like) and immediately begins copying it. Third, the only way to stop this once it has begun is to unplug the drive from your machine. I could not find a way to get at these files on the drive to remove them; for this reason I will not be able to return it to the store since whoever buys this particular drive next will have some of my files. My computer also ran with difficulty after plugging in this drive (brand new Toshiba Portege), so I even ran some malware scans. Those turned up negative, so at least those fears were suppressed.
I strongly recommend buying anything else. - Portable - Western Digital - Computer Backup - Portable Hard Drive'
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