You can never, ever, ever have enough storage! Repeat that a few times! You can never have enough storage…Music, movies, photos, data… it all takes up space. And of course once you have accumulated a fair amount of stuff, YOU HAVE TO MAKE SURE THAT IT IS BACKED UP. Gone are the days of floppy disks, zip disks, and tape drives. Now backing up your data is super easy with an external hard drive.
I have used a Western Digital Passport drive for about 2 years I think. I purchased it to carry around and swap files between my large laptop and my little pink netbook that I had at the time. The pink netbook has since been upgraded, but I still have my Passport. It is 320gb and I have a LOT of stuff. I am constantly taking more pics, or recording more movies, so the space does fill up. As you can see from the below photo, I recently skinned it. 🙂 Plus, the drive on my main laptop is 500gb, so 320gb was not big enough to back up the whole thing.
I was recently talking to a Western Digital rep about another product and mentioned that I had just been looking at the new line of Passport drives because I needed to upgrade. She generously sent me 2 new Western Digital Passport Essential Limited Edition Designer Drives to check out and review.
What she didn't realize was that she sent me the perfect drives! As anyone who sees my blog can tell, I love pink. I received the  drive in black with a pink stripe. And my honey is a DJ who loves and records music, so the drive with the neat Boom Box on it is perfect for him.
The size is small, thinner, and lighter than my older drive. Also, the interface is now a Micro USB adapter rather than Mini USB. The size makes it perfect for carrying in a purse or small laptop case, or even your back pocket! But don't sit on it. 🙂
The drives come with WD Smartware software that lets you backup, encrypt and protect your data. One great thing about this program is that as soon as you install and run it, it categorizes all of your files, so you know exactly how much pictures, music, movies, & documents you have. It can be easy as pie and automatic. Or you have the choice of clicking on Detailed View to choose what you wish to back up. You can also set a password on your drive to keep others from accessing your files. But make sure that you do not forget this! There is no way to recover it.
After backing up, retrieving files is just as easy. You could easily retrieve files to the same location on your computer, a new location, or even a new computer.
The only *bad* ( if you want to call it that) thing about this drive is that there is 35gb of unusable space that you can't get to no matter what you do. However, this is NOT unique to these drives, most all 500gb external drives seem to be that way. As is the one on my laptop. There is that hidden partition full of system files that we can't touch for recovery purposes, etc.
Overall, this is a great drive and it's easy to use to insure that your files are backed up, transport files from work to home, or keep 2 computers in sync.
The drives are now priced at only $79 on Amazon.com.
whats the difference between a netbook passport and an ordinary hard drive, i have 1 and 2 terrabyte harddrives and need to get a 3 terrabyte. I like w d products and buy them
The 35Gb of theWestern Digital Passport Essential review isn’t unused space, it has to do with the capacity measurements of MB (Megabyte) and MiB (Mebibyte). 500 GB (Gigabyte) is actually approximately 465 GiB (Gibibyte).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Capacity_measurements
Then they should call it a 465gb drive. 🙂
Yep that would be less confusing
Well, the loss of space is due to the difference in tables that define a terabyte, which is used by the hard drive manufacturers versus Microsoft. Windows calls Gibibytes(GiB) Gigabytes, yes I know it doesn’t sounds really logic and I guess it’s also unnecessarily confusing.
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Hi Elena. Did you mean to leave this on one of the giveaway posts?
Before buying anything from Western Digital I highly recommend you check out their own forum at: http://community.wdc.com/
There is one thread titled “WD External Hard drive not recognized in my computer” that’s had over 31,000 views… Very worrying indeed..! I have personally had 2 of their external drives fail on me within 12 months.
I like Western Digital drives, I’ve not had a bad experience with one yet, I have an older gray 80GB passport which has served me well, a 1TB My Book which I use for backing up my computer, and recently brought a 1TB passport essential, I guess the geek in me couldn’t resist a 1TB drive that small 😀
Yeah but you know her highness wants what she wants… and she wants a
custom skin!
The one with the skin on it is my older one just like the one that you have. These new ones with the fancy designs need no skins! 🙂 However, they do still sell the older ones that you skin.
Nice… After reading this I might have to go on and bite the bullet and upgrade my 6 year old 300GB one that ran on AC, especially seeing how much lighter and smaller they are, and how nice they look with skins!
Cool beans. I def need to invest on one of these as I have a bunch of flash drives that have to sort through to fins anything.
Tiffany
Peace, Love and Chocolate