Western Digital Passport Essential Review

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.