Western Digital My Passport Essential 320 GB USB 2 0 Portable Hard Drive WDME3200TN Midnight Black

Western Digital My Passport Essential 320 GB USB 2 0 Portable Hard Drive WDME3200TN Midnight Black

These elegant portable drives are simple to use, light and easy to carry, and require no power adapter — they are powered directly through the USB cable. Pack up your office files and take them home. Carry thousands of songs or pictures. Synchronize files between home and office and encrypt everything on the drive for added security. WD Sync synchronization and encryption software lets you take your critical data with you. Plug My Passport into any PC, edit files, read e-mail, and view photos. Then sync all of your changes back to your home or office computer. Your data is protected with 128-bit encryption (Windows only). Perfect for the business traveler who needs to transfer large amounts of data from laptop to clients or just daily backups in case of accidents from mishandled luggage to coffee spills. Also comes in handy if your worried about laptop theft and someone else having access to your important data, you can store it on this portable encrypted drive instead. For all those precious pictures, videos, music and data files, getting this external hard drive is a must have. WD Sync synchronization and encryption software lets you save your critical data and take it with you. Plug your drive into any PC, edit files, read e-mail, and view photos. Then sync all of your changes back to your home or office computer (Windows only) Search your drive, manage your photos, and simplify Web searches with included Google software (Windows only) Up to 480Mb/sec Bus Transfer Rate with USB 2.0 System Requirements - Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Mac OS X (10.1.5 or later), Available USB port Approximate Unit Dimensions - 0.59 (H) x 4.96 (L) x 3.14 (W) Approximate Unit Weight - 0.23lb

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars My Passport
This is by far the best external hard disk I have ever purchased. The great advantage of it is no need of external power supply. This was given a gift to someone and the recipient was quite happy with item, considering, it was plug and play and in their palm, they can get more than 300G worth of data. I would have gone for 500G, but when I bought this 500G was quite expensive, but it seems the price for 500G has come down a lot, lately. I would recommend this product to anyone..

5 Stars satisfied customer
I am very satisfied with my purchase of the Western Digital Portable Hard Drive. It is very easy to transfer data to the hard drive and it is also easily accessible when I travel.

5 Stars Good transfer rate, excelent OS compatibility.
Hi!

I just got this drive (has been using it for around 18 hours so far), so I won’t talk about reliability yet. My setup:

+ Dell Inspiron 6400 (2 x Intel Core Duo - 32 bits 1.83GHz) and old Compaq v2000 (1 x Turion 64 1.8GHz).

+ RAM: doesn’t matter (really, I’m not testing cached reads/writes).

+ Debian GNU/Linux Lenny.

+ LUKS encrypted hard drive (cipher: aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 - 128bits).

+ ext2 filesystem over LUKS through device manager (DM).

Transfer rates:

Dell Inspiron 6400:

Sequential Write (bypassing OS cache, encrypting): 23.9MB/s

Sequential Read (direct I/O, bypassing OS cache, encrypting): 24.5MB/s

Sequential Read (direct I/O, no filesystem, no encrypting): 31.9MB/s

Compaq V2000:

Sequential Write (bypassing OS cache, encrypting): 20.9MB/s

Sequential Read (direct I/O, bypassing OS cache, encrypting): 22.4MB/s

Sequential Read (direct I/O, no filesystem, no encrypting): 22.1MB/s

I measured this on a Dell Inspiron 6400, running Debian GNU/Linux.

I’m very pleased, I know there are faster external HD out there, but this runs very cool, and is really quiet, I can only tell it is working when I put my hand over it.

I’m glad I got this hard drive.

1 Star DOA and Replacement Dead within 3 Months
The first 320 Passport was dead on arrive. Replaced it with the same drive which worked for a while. Stored and transported it in a handy Case Logic case, never dropped it, worked fine for a couple of months, and then randomly dead. The computer detects the drive but can’t access.

WD Tech support confirmed that it’s dead: either a firmware problem, bad circuit board or bad drive. Offered to recover the data for a fee which I declined. They sent me a third drive that I put on eBay because I couldn’t trust it. I also had to pay the shipping to return the corrupt drive.

If you decide to get this drive, consider two… one to backup the backup.

2 Stars Instruction deficient, poor technical support for newbies (or quasi-newbies)
The Passport drive itself is a very nice product. My complaint is that there were no written instructions other than ‘plug in the USB cables’. While there was a portion that was touted as instructions in Acrobat format, these turned out to be various instructions on formatting, and other specs–not the basic getting started info. Once the software was installed, I tried to access the drive and/or help instructions. None of the icons in the folder allowed it, so I re-installed, only to get a message that synch failed. Meanwhile, other problems cropped up on other apps on my system, and my DSL provider suggested it was related to the irrelevant Google items downloaded with the WD app. Long story short: 2 emails to tech support went unanswered. When I finally resolved the other computer issue I finally received two belated emails from WD. One advised I download an app to detect whether there was a bad sector. The other gave out 7 different links under different headings, any one of which may or may not have been related to the issue. Rather than a simple straightforward answer, the expectation was for the customer to poke around their web site to figure out how to not only operate the device, but fix a problem–i.e., aimed at those with copious time and patience (and/or a deeper understanding of computers than the “average” user). Eventually, I spoke to a very nice technician who walked me thru another installation and advised me to wait for it to be done overnight. The next morning, I followed the instruction to click on OK. Shortly after, the application stopped any further processing and became non-responsive. I tried to call the special help line she had given me (along with my case #) for a “higher” level of tech help… only to have the outgoing menu tell me there was to be a charge… yet, I persisted. After 15 mins. on hold, I gave up and went to find the package the drive had been shipped in. Since I couldn’t locate it, I poked around in all sorts of areas on my computer, on their web site and by some sort of “divine” intervention, I suddenly found myself able to get things functioning the way they should have been from the start.

Would it have killed them to include basic written instructions on what to expect after the app installed? Or to have made a web site that was not aimed at the master geek level of user? Or responded to my emails with specific instructions rather than a menu of “try this”, “try that”, and if those don’t work, here’s six more places to putter around and try to discern which actually applies to your case.

As I wrote to them: I felt like one of those poodles in the circus… running around the ring, jumping through hoops and getting nowhere, but amusing someone.

I’m glad to have a working external drive, but it is hardly “plug ‘n play”. In fact, it was a frustrating, time-consuming, annoying process. Had I known it would have been like that, there’s no way I would have purchased the product.

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