My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAA5000AD6-NESN Best Price

Okay, despite of all the negative reviews I have seen for this portable drive, I would say there is a doubt
about them.

This is the Second drive “My Passport Essential 500GB” I get, the first was Black midnight color, the second was
the Amazon Exclusive Robot Design. Both comes already NTFS formatted with 465GB ready to use. you could format it
to other File Systems if you like to make it work for MacOS X or Linux.

The Black one had the Virtual CD that keeps nagging me. And popping up every time you hook up the usb with your
computer which can disabled by updating the firmware from Western Digital website. but you can not delete it,
nevertheless it’s not taking any space from the drive itself.

The Robot Design one, on the contrary, doesn’t have the Virtual CD installed, and the first time you plug it in
you could see Western Digital SmartWare backup solution on the drive itself, which you can easily delete.

One of the folders that comes installed by default contains the drivers for WD SES Device, you need this to fully
install device driver without failing, although the drive will work and appears in “My Computer” without it.

I admit the Glossy finish on the black drive is fingerprint/dust magnet and can be easily scrathed, but its
beauty makes it tolerable. Robot Design makes the dust, fingerprints and even scratches harder to see.

About performance, I wont lie to say it’s faster than my old laptops internal drive, I copied 3GB of data in less
than 2 minutes, allow me to go out of this review’s scope a little bit so you can even improve the drive’s
performance further if you go to “My Computer-> Right Click on My Passport drive -> Properties -> Select Hardware
tab -> make sure WD My Passport is selected from the list that contains available drives in your computer ->
Click Properties -> Select Policies tab -> Now select Optimize for Performance click Ok then Ok again. Now you
will notice significant improvement on drive speed, but that way you can’t unplug the drive without clicking on
Safely remove drive from system tray icons near the clock” running Win Vista here, Win7 will differ a little bit,
but there is the same option around in these tabs.

The cool thing about this drive it doesn’t need external power supply, despite of saying it needs USB 2.0 to work
with I successfully plugged it in Playstation 2 which uses USB 1.1 and it works flawlessly, this is just an
example you wont benefit anything from doing this unless you have the reasons to do so. but this means it could
work with older computers with USB 1.1 boards.

The USB cable a bit short, it would be better if it’s 1ft longer.
The Drive is calm, no noise while operating the drive and no heat.
The Size is so small you could put it in your jacket’s chest pocket.

The last thing to say that Amazon’s Exclusive Robot Design a little bit better than the Black since it doesn’t
have the Virtual CD thing, and you can’t beat the price it’s $30 cheaper (at the time of writing this $49.99 for
Robot Design VS $79.99 for the Black midnight) I couldn’t resist but to buy one..

I hope this review would be helpful to some, and forgive my rants if I went off topic.

Regards, Rebel_X

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