Customer Reviews

WD My Passport 2TB Portable Hard Drive - Black

5 star:		(516)
4 star:		(118)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(37)

 

 

Yet another fantastic hard drive by Western Digital - this is the second that I have. Like the previous reviewer said, just plug and play and it's ready to go. One other point of note is that it is USB 3.0 (and backwards compatable with USB 2). Essentially, this just means that for computers with USB 3.0 slots, your data transfer speed will be a lot faster. I have two of these for different reasons - transferring files from home (mac) to work (windows) and vice versa. No issues with differences in operating system. The second reason is to use it to back up files using Time Machine on the Mac. For both of these functions, the drive is silent and works perfectly. I have no hesitations for recommending this for both Windows and Mac users, with speed, reliability and silence just three of the many reasons to pick this as one of the best portable hard drives you can buy.

Doubtful at first glans, quality, size, speed, noise. Impressed with ease of use, was concerned about compatibility issues with MBP which was unjust. This work seamlessly with USB 3 on MacBook Pro. The device is slightly "chunkier" than imagined, however relative to its virtual size there is no compromise. The case has rubber feet instead of plastic canceling out any vibrations caused by the HDD. Solid USB 3 connection that connects firmly to the device in case of accidental nudges. The overall quality feel of the device could be better but better than most competitors with similar pricing. Great value for money! Would defiantly recommend this device to anyone looking for a large storage solution that is portable.

This drive is a marvel - 2 whole terrabytes of data in something you can slip into your pocket. It's dimensions are 11cm x 8cm x 2cm. As such, it's not very well padded and a case is probably a good investment. I did have some problems getting it work properly but don't let it put you off as that seems to be down to my own PC. I ran several Google searches and similar problems are clearly extremely rare. Having said that, just in case you have a similar setup I've described the issue further down. But for the vast majority of people, it will be irrelevant.

The built-in software on this drive is intended for data backup only. It doesn't and cannot backup your entire system. For most people this is absolutely fine - it is your data which is really the precious stuff after all. Techie types who want system backups will probably have their own favourite software anyway. It is a routine thing to re-partition the drive and setup your own sytem. WD even provide instructions. Actually, you may not want to do that. The security built in to the drive is probably worth keeping (especially on so portable a drive), so just use some of the spare space how you want. You can choose whether or not to install Smartware during setup.

If you're happy with data backup only, then you have two ways of doing it. You can let the Smartware take care of finding all your data files wherever they're hiding, or you can choose which drives and folders you want to back up. In my opinion, this is the best of both worlds - I hate trusting something to choose what to back up when I have my own idiosyncratic filing system, but beginners will be happy with the "no-brainer" aspect of just letting Smartware get on with it. If you keep the Passport attached, it will backup your files and all your changes in the background. If you remove the drive in order to keep your backup elsewhere (a very good idea) then it will resume backing up all changed files each time you plug it in.

Retrieving files is also pretty straightforward. If it's the computer on which the software is installed you can choose to retrieve files to a separate folder in Documents (especially useful if you're retrieving older copies) or you can simply have them restored to wherever they were backed up from. Smartware keeps a copy of the last five versions of your files by default but, again, you are free to change this to more or fewer. For the technically savvy, you can just go and fish the files off the backup drive - they're stored, plain and simple, in their file structure with their proper names. It's the whole drive that is security protected not the backup itself. Very nice.

So what if it's a new machine or a new hard drive? Plug in the drive and the security autoruns and asks you for the password if you have set one (which you really should do!). You can install the Smartware to access your files through that interface, or just navigate around the Passport and find the files you want.

Incidentally, it's perfectly possible to use this Passport drive as a backup for a number of machines.

An annoying wrinkle which had me floored at first: sometimes Smartware comes up with the Backup and Retrieve tabs greyed out and disabled. After much head-scratching and finally a Google search, I discovered that if you click on the Passport drive icon on the main screen all is well. An odd oversight in useability.

Overall, this is an excellent piece of kit. I really like the flexibility WD have built in; you can plug and go if you just want a simple backup system but if you have exacting demands of your own, the flexibility is there. And it's tiny. Did I mention it's tiny? It's also quite an expensive purchase of course. WD do Passport drives in smaller sizes - 500gb & 1gb - which will be plenty for very many people and quite a bit cheaper.

Hardware issue mentioned above
------------------------------
I'm running a very standard Windows 7 64-bit installation on a popular Gigabyte motherboard (GA-P55A-UD3) using an NEC USB 3.0 controller. It is a couple of years old and it is a relatively 'early' incarnation of USB 3.0, so there maybe something in that. I had multiple problems getting the drive recognised and running properly but they all seemed to go away by a change in the BIOS setting. The motherboard is set to AUTO recognise SATA 3 and/or USB 3 hardware. My experience has been that both work only intermittently - I installed an SSD on the SATA 3 ports and it was recognised by the BIOS maybe one time in three (not helpful for a boot drive...). USB3 seemed to give me a similar problem. Most of the time the drive just wasn't recognised as existing (although oddly a USB 3 scanner doesn't have a similar problem). The solution? I changed the BIOS setting to 'TURBO USB 3' (forget the exact words) and it seems to have solved the problem - but do reboot a second time before connecting the Passport.

It arrived in good time and well packaged. It's beautifully crafted, Started to fill it up but beware mine stopped working at 1600gb - 1800gb. Just makes a clicking sound with windows errors saying damaged partition. Just don't put all your eggs in one basket otherwise you might lose it all had the same issue with a WD 3.5'' Ext when they 1st came out. Just a heads up, reply if you have the same issue. Ace Amazon returns service.

I have 2 of these, i bought my dad one last year for Christmas, and this one was for my brother for his birthday.........thats how much i rate them. Simply plug and play and away you go. I use a Macbook so i had to format it before i used it so i can use it with Apple and Microsoft computers, its really easy to do, simply google it and there are loads of step by step instructions. My dad and brother both use microsoft computers so they use the pre-loaded WD software which my dad massively rates. Everytime you plug this into your computer, it reads both drives and automatically copies new files from your computer onto the hard drive ensuring you have a complete mirror of your PC docs......simples! Otherwise you just do what i do and drag and drop files to it.

Its capable of being encrypted and has the option to password protect it.

Its small, light and sleek. Comes in a variety of colours, i have the 1TB red one and 500GB white one, both look great and my father has the 1TB silver and my brother the 1TB blue. All colours look good, i just buy whichever one is cheapest at the time personally!

We all know the price of these things fluctuate daily so keep an eye on them and if they are cheap, buy them there and then, they could double in price over night!

As with all hard drives, my advice, make sure you have more than one. Not just because of failure (which i dont think they will unless you are a klutz and drop it!) but you should never keep all your eggs in one basket, 1TB of data is a lot of data to lose. Personally i have 3 hard drives which i keep at different locations just in case of fire, break ins etc. Your call though.

All in all thoroughly recommend these drives. And i highly recommend if you carry it around with you, you invest in the WD hard case (link below) they make the drive a little bigger but are worth it for knocks and bumps.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Nomad-Rugged-Passport/dp/B005DRN5DO/ref=sr_1_16?ie=UTF8&qid=1354284254&sr=8-16

Even though there is every reason to expect any external hard drive to be usable as a boot disk on a Mac, these days some manufacturers perform tweaks to their drives (such as omitting certain components from USB controllers to further reduce the size of the drives) that inadvertently prevent them from being bootable on a Mac.

Samsung's S2 portable drives and even some of Western Digital's own FireWire drives come to mind.

Prior to buying this drive, which at the time of this review is currently the only widely available 2TB USB 3.0 bus-powered portable hard drive, I was unable to find any information online about whether it boots a Mac, so I finally decided to try it out for myself.

I am happy to report that this drive (Western Digital My Passport 2TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive) can indeed be successfully used to boot a Mac, via both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0.

For best results (and especially if booting is required) on a Mac, you'll need to first format the drive using Apple's Disk Utility, as with other drives that have not been pre-formatted for the Mac. This can take from under a minute to a couple of minutes at most.

If desired, Disk Utility can be used to create multiple partitions on this drive, one or more of which can be made bootable by either installing OS X onto it, or cloning an existing bootable partition.

Hope this helps others who may be looking for this information before their purchase.

I purchased two of these 2TB USB3 disks and they are great. I am pleased the activity LED is now super bright. Sadly the supplied USB cable is a bit mean... about 50cms long. All in all, I'm happy.

But...

I did a full format (six hours!) and was disappointed to see the initial 120 Mb/sec (fantastic) drop to about 90 Mb/sec when half way through and end up at 58 Mb/sec at the end.

I have now researched this characteristic and it appears common to all little disk drives. As the disk fills up, so the disk throughput slows down. This is because the speed of the data passing under the read/write heads is slower as you move nearer the centre of the disk.

Initial Acronis backups of my SSD confirm the disk is both reading and writing at about 100 Mb/sec... but the disk is still 75% empty!

So... don't buy this disk on the basis of some 'expert' review who says he/she measured 120 Mb/sec. Buy this disk because it averages 86 Mb/sec, is physically small, has a 2Tb (unformatted) capacity, is USB powered, is made a respectable company and costs only £120 + VAT.

I already have a couple of the 1TB "My Passport " drive, and I am very pleased to see this 2TB version.

I have USB3.0 ports on my PC so the speed of this drive is excellent - as would be expected. It is also fully USB2.0 compatible.

The drive comes with the WD software - I know some users like it and some users don't. What I did with my 1TB drives : one I reformatted completely without the WD software, so that I could use it simply as a removeable/portable media and exchange files with other users (without them needing to install WD software). I kept the second drive with the WD software, to give password protection and to take advantage of the back-up software.

I very much like the finish on this 2TB drive, it has a matt effect, and looks as if it will wear better then the very glossy finish on the 1TB drives.
Overall the case also feels more sturdy on the 2TB drive then on the 1TB, as if the material is slightly thicker.

The 2TB drive is a couple of millimetres taller (thicker) than the 1TB drive, but seems to fit all the same cases, particularly the Western Digital Nomad Rugged Case for My Passport Hard Drive. This 2TB drive definitely fits the rugged case - I am using them together.

I am very happy with this purchase.

This little drive is amazingly small for any drive, let alone a 2TB capacity drive. Its basic functionality is trivially easy to install on a Windows 7 PC. Just plug it into a USB 2 or USB 3 port.

Being made by Western Digital, this drive should be reliable. It is in a sleek black casing, slightly larger than my hand and about the same thickness.

It comes with its own encryption software that can be set up very easily so that the drive can not be decrypted without a password, but you can set it to be tied to your own windows user account, so it works with the account, without asking for a password each time.

On the downside on my low powered laptop, the encryption/decryption software seems to take a large percentage of my processor, hence the the loss of a star.

It is pretty quick when connected to a USB 2 port, but when connected to a USB 3 port on a fast PC, it is faster than the current generation of SATA II internal drives, and almost as fast as the new generation of SATA III drives. It peaks at about 5Gb/sec while SATA III peaks at about 6 Gb/sec.

BEfore buying this drive i read lot of reviews in internet and amazon as well. so many people said wrong about the software and mostly that is the main disadvantage everyone felt. At last i decided to give it a try and now i have it. If anyone say there is a problem with the smartware software , that means they doesnt know how to deal with it.

q: Some say the password protection is not working..
a: actually the password protection is working properly but the thing is when you set the password for the first time, while typing without your knowledge the typing cursor moves to next field. So if you dont notice that closely while you type the password itself you set something else other than the real password in your mind.

q: backup doesnt have schedule.
a: actually you can set timer, there is an option in it which schedule your back up when system is idle or else install the software and uncheck everything in download option. So it wont download anything. come on people. you have to look every option inside.

There are lot of strange things people saying about this. But please dont listen to them. you can even keep this drive as traditional drag and drop drive by deleting all the softwares given by WD at first.

Verdict: This is perfect drive . Dont listen to cynical people who just didnt fully explore it.