WD My Passport 1TB Portable External Hard Drive Storage USB 3.0 Black

WD My Passport 1TB Portable External Hard Drive Storage USB 3.0 Black..

Buy WD My Passport 1TB Portable External Hard Drive Storage USB 3.0 Black By Western Digital

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1419 of 1463 people found the following review helpful.
Great drive - Faulty USB cable
By Jon Anderson
Over the recent years I have purchased quite a number of these drives. I have a couple of USB 2.0 drives and about 12 of the USB 3.0 drives. They all performed flawlessly with my old computer. I purchased that computer in 2006 before these USB 3.0 drives existed and so the computer had only USB 2.0 ports. All the USB 3.0 drives worked perfectly in the computer with the USB 2.0 ports.

Then in December 2012 I purchased a new computer and it has USB 3.0 ports. I connected a drive and was anticipating the "blazing speed" for file transfers. But there was a problem...

The drive would lose connection and I would get an error message saying that the transfer did not complete and data was lost etc., etc.

I contacted the computer manufacturer and they claimed it was a Western Digital problem. I thought they were just passing the buck, but I did some research and found that there are very many complaints all over the Internet about the Passport USB 3.0 drives losing connections. The descriptions were fairly consistent: it happened most frequently when transferring large amounts of data (such as 2 Gb, for example).

There were two theories:
(1) The Passport drive uses only a single USB connection and therefore it draws all power through that USB port. The USB port, being compliant with the USB 3.0 protocol, does not provide enough power for the drive to spin the hard disk fast enough for the data transfer at USB 3.0 speeds. That results in the errors and lost connection.
(2) The USB cables from Western Digital are defective.

So I thought I'd test theory (2) first. I got on Amazon and found a seller for a compatible USB 3.0 cable, ordered it, received it, plugged it in - and the drive works just fine. I selected a folder that had a large amount of data (8.4 Gb) and copied it to my C drive - no problem. I copied it back and forth several times and it always worked (with "blazing speed", I might add - 100 Mb per sec - WHEW!!). I tried different drives - they all worked just like I expected. That seemed to confirm to me that the cables were defective in some way.

I called Western Digital support. The Technical Support person sounded happy to help me. I described the problem to him. The first reply was that the support person put me on hold to discuss it with his supervisor. He came back and thanked me for bringing it to their attention and asked if there was anything else he could do. I said, "Yes - you can replace the cables." I have 7 drives that are still within the warranty period, so I would expect a replacement for at least those drive cables.

After discussing with his supervisor again, he said only one cable could be replaced. I said that was not acceptable. He said it was a problem with the system that would not allow him to process more than one. I said that was not my problem and I expected to get the cables replaced for at least the drives that are in warranty or I would become a Seagate customer. He spoke with his supervisor again and said he could do it. I guess his supervisor must have somehow fixed the problem with the system.

Anyway, he said I would be receiving replacement cables. I asked if they would be the same identical cables which would also not work. He discussed with his supervisor - again - and said I would be receiving y-cables. At that I explained to him that this indicates to me that Western Digital has identified the cause of the problem to be a power issue - that not enough power is being pulled from using just one USB port. He said, yes that was correct.

I asked what I should do when I need a new drive and the market is filled with product that was shipped with the inadequate cables. Am I supposed to just wait until that inventory sells off or should I instead buy Seagate drives... He said I can buy a Western Digital drive and call them right away. They will send a replacement y-cable. He didn't sound very happy at this point.

Note that when I first called Western Digital, the response was to appear like they had never heard of this before and to just blow me off.
After I pressed, the next response was to try to mollify me with just a single replacement cable.
Finally, they essentially admitted that they knew all about this all along and also had a solution that they never offered to me until I pressed hard.

So I still think Western Digital hard drives are among the best. But they have an identified, known, and confirmed defect in the USB 3.0 drive design (really just inadequate cables). Their response is to keep silent about it and hope people don't notice or just put up with it.

Therefore, I would have provided a 5-star rating for the drive, but because of the poor approach to Customer Service I knocked them down a couple of notches.

Shame on you Western Digital!! I place a lot of stock in the Customer Support a company gives, and in the honesty of the company to their customers. My confidence in you as a company is seriously undermined by this. Seagate may not be my provider for my drives at this point, and although I never seriously considered them before, I *AM* considering them seriously now.

Note this, Western Digital: I WAS a very satisfied customer. I continued to purchase drives even though I never posted an evaluation of the drives. Now I have become a somewhat dissatisfied customer and I have taken the time and made the effort to post this evaluation. Think about that...

2896 of 3019 people found the following review helpful.
An essential storage backup tool in a digital world
By Techie
I'm a computer repair technician, and one issue I have all the time with my customers is, the famous, 'a virus hijacked my computer and those precious pictures are inside'. Yeah, the prom, the honeymoon, or the newborn pictures are usually held without ransom. Most of the time we are dealing with malware of some sort that affects the Windows operating system files, but leaves the data intact. So, before I repair the computer, I rescue the pictures, and any other file they might value. However, not all repair technicians do this, most allege that the files are corrupted, which might be the case, but usually it really means they are too busy to rescue anything, don't know how to do it, or will not do it unless paid big cash.

For one own's sakes, the best thing to do is backing up the data before the computer gets infected, or the hard drive fails. For pictures I recommend backing up the original files into data discs, but for faster everyday files backups (music, movies, games, software etc.) is better to use an external hard drive.

The Western Digital My Passport 2 TB is an awesome way to carry large amounts of data in a tiny container, that is always available and secure. I love its dimensions, both physically and in bytes.

Also, the truly fast data transfers done with the USB 3.0 interface save time every day. Speaking of the USB connector, another great feature is that only requires a single USB port for power, while many external hard drives and enclosures, with form factor 2.5", require two USB ports.

This drive is great not only to keep multimedia files, but also for storing documents in digital form, because it saves space. Besides, in case of an emergency it's faster to grab it then a folder. I've been doing backups using both hard drives and discs, and it has been of great help throughout the years. For example, the last time I moved, the new school district wanted my daughter first vaccines' records. I knew I have the original card somewhere in a box, but I needed it fast. Then I remembered I scanned the card years ago, and that print-scanned image, which was storage in my daughter's digital folder, inside my external hard drive, saved me hours of search and quickened her registering process at the new school.

About the WD SmartWare software offered by the manufacturer, I hesitated before going for it, because in the past WD back up software didn't work well for me. However, when one is dealing with such a big amount of data, doing it manually is a pain, and the alternative of using the backup and restore features included in Microsoft Windows 7, is something I would only do for a complete system image, not for the everyday backup. So, I installed the WD SmartWare software and so far, it's performing well, it does require time and attention to learn its functionality though. If you decide not to use the WD SmartWare, you can still use the hard drive right out of the box, like any other external hard drive.

Besides reading the user's manual, I strongly suggest that before plugging in the drive into your computer, you go to the Western Digital My Passport's support page, and read how to use it.

Because there are a few details to know before starting backing up your data. Among these topics, How to install WD SmartWare from the external drives, How to create a category backup using WD SmartWare, How to backup specific files and folders using WD SmartWare, How to retrieve a backup using WD SmartWare, Setting up security to lock or unlock a WD external drive with WD SmartWare, (videos are provided in some of these), and How to partition and format a WD drive on Windows (7, Vista, XP) and Mac OSX etc., etc.

I can't post links here, but one can do a search for WD Support / Downloads / My Passport and will find the page where a variety of software that works with the Western Digital My Passport 2 TB, can be downloaded for free.

However, the most important fact of reading Western Digital's support information for this drive, is to learn how to use it 'before' entrusting your valuable data to it. Specially, if you choose to install the WD SmartWare software.

There are very important steps everybody should know while setting up these drives, so it's clearly stated on the Western Digital's support pages.

For example, while installing the software, it will ask if you want to apply any security (password & encryption) to the drive. Before setting up the password you must check an, I understand box, certifying that you understood that if you forget the password, the data is unrecoverable. I repeat, and excuse the capitals, but this is crucial, IF YOU FORGET THE PASSWORD, THE DATA IS UNRECOVERABLE.

Since there is no way to retrieve your password if you forget it, please write that password in a secure available location. If you want, it's possible to change your security settings, remove security or/and change the password, but in order to do either, you still need the original password entered the first time.

If you forget your password, you will not be able to access the data storage in the hard drive, but you can continue to use the drive again if you format it. Of course, the process of reformatting the hard drive will erase all the data inside the unit, and remove the password.

I highly recommend the Western Digital My Passport 2 TB external hard drive.

I do have an warning though, the only proven and trusted way to preserve important files is to burn them into data discs (CD/DVD/Blu-rays). Because hard drives have a limited lifespan, and will fail sooner or later, usually without any warning signs. An external hard drive is very convenient to use, but the stuff that cannot be easily replaced, should always first be backed up on discs. Trust me, it will give you peace of mind. Also you can have two different hard drives with the same information, like I do. If you really don't want to keep discs around anymore.

964 of 1005 people found the following review helpful.
The PERFECT External Storage Drive For My Macbook Pro
By Ronald Epstein
Wow. So many mixed reviews here, and like those of you who are pondering over whether it is worth purchasing this Western Digital MY PASSPORT, there may not be a clear answer.

Let me tell you my story.

Recently bought the new Retina Macbook Pro with its 500GB SSD drive. For a person like me who puts a lot of software on my laptop and does quite a bit of movie editing, hard drive space is a premium. So, when figuring out how to handle nearly 200GB of music, I decided it would probably be best to run iTunes off an external drive instead of taking up space on the Macbook.

Again...Wow. Reading these reviews on Amazon was quite unnerving. So many great experiences with this drive followed up by a handful of negative experiences -- many talking of total hard drive failure. It's almost as if you are rolling the dice as to whether you'll receive a drive that works or doesn't.

...then there's the reviews from people who claim they are having problems using this drive on their Mac.

Well, I picked myself out a RED 1TB drive. Thought it was a cool color and didn't mind paying the premium price for it. In addition, I picked up this fantastic Case Logic QHDC-101 Hard Case on Amazon for $10. It's the perfect compliment to the red hard drive that fits snuggly inside.

Using the Western Digital MY PASSPORT on a Mac couldn't be easier than opening the package, plugging the USB cord into the Macbook, and then formatting it using Disk Utilities. From package to format took under 4 minutes.

And for anyone claiming to have a problem using this drive with their Mac, this is all you need to do...

1. Plug in the drive via USB connection
2. Go to APPLICATIONS -> UTILITIES -> DISK UTILITY
3. Click on the hard drive icon located at the very top left sidebar
4. Select the ERASE tab and FORMAT in Max OSX Extended (Journaled). Assign your drive a name if you wish.

That's it. Easy.

The drive works incredibly fast thanks to its USB 3.0 compatibility, which is backwards-compatible with USB 2.0. The drive is extremely quiet, and I didn't notice it getting warm.

And, yes, you can run your iTunes off the external drive.

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WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EFRX

WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EFRX..

Special Price WD Red 1 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD10EFRX By Western Digital

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1001 of 1090 people found the following review helpful.
Regular consumer drives in RAID are accident waiting to happen
By Gary E. Peterson
Here is a quote from a review at pcper.com

I'm going to let the cat out of the bag right here and now. Everyone's home RAID is likely an accident waiting to happen. If you're using regular consumer drives in a large array, there are some very simple (and likely) scenarios that can cause it to completely fail. I'm guilty of operating under this same false hope - I have an 8-drive array of 3TB WD Caviar Greens in a RAID-5. For those uninitiated, RAID-5 is where one drive worth of capacity is volunteered for use as parity data, which is distributed amongst all drives in the array. This trick allows for no data loss in the case where a single drive fails. The RAID controller can simply figure out the missing data by running the extra parity through the same formula that created it. This is called redundancy, but I propose that it's not.

Since I'm also guilty here with my huge array of Caviar Greens, let me also say that every few weeks I have a batch job that reads *all* data from that array. Why on earth would I need to occasionally and repeatedly read 21TB of data from something that should already be super reliable? Here's the failure scenario for what might happen to me if I didn't:
* Array starts off operating as normal, but drive 3 has a bad sector that cropped up a few months back. This has gone unnoticed because the bad sector was part of a rarely accessed file.
* During operation, drive 1 encounters a new bad sector.
* Since drive 1 is a consumer drive it goes into a retry loop, repeatedly attempting to read and correct the bad sector.
* The RAID controller exceeds its timeout threshold waiting on drive 1 and marks it offline.
* Array is now in degraded status with drive 1 marked as failed.
* User replaces drive 1. RAID controller initiates rebuild using parity data from the other drives.
* During rebuild, RAID controller encounters the bad sector on drive 3.
* Since drive 3 is a consumer drive it goes into a retry loop, repeatedly attempting to read and correct the bad sector.
* The RAID controller exceeds its timeout threshold waiting on drive 3 and marks it offline.
* Rebuild fails.

At this point the way forward varies from controller to controller, but the long and short of it is that the data is at extreme risk of loss. There are ways to get it all back (most likely without that one bad sector on drive 3), but none of them are particularly easy. Now you may be asking yourself how enterprises run huge RAIDs and don't see this sort of problem? The answer is Time Limited Error Recovery - where the hard drive assumes it is part of an array, assumes there is redundancy, and is not afraid to quickly tell the host controller that it just can't complete the current I/O request.

Here's how that scenario would have played out if the drives implemented some form of TLER:
* Array starts off operating as normal, but drive 3 has developed a bad sector several weeks ago. This went unnoticed because the bad sector was part of a rarely accessed file.
* During operation, drive 1 encounters a new bad sector.
* Drive 1 makes a few read attempts and then reports a CRC error to the RAID controller.
* The RAID controller maps out the bad sector, locating it elsewhere on the drive. The missing sector is rebuilt using parity data from the other drives in the array.
*Array continues normal operation, with the error added to its event log.

The above scenario is what would play out with an Areca RAID controller (I've verified this personally). Other controllers may behave differently. A controller unable to do a bad sector remap might have just marked drive 1 as bad, but the key is that the rebuild would be much less likely to fail as drive 3 would not drop completely offline once the controller ran into the additional bad sector. The moral of this story is that typical consumer grade drives have data error timeouts that are far longer than the drive offline timeout of typical RAID controllers, and without some form of TLER, two bad sectors (totaling 1024 bytes) is all that's required to put multiple terabytes of data in grave danger.

The Solution:
The solution should be simple - just get some drives with TLER. The problem is that until now those were prohibitively expensive. Enterprise drives have all sorts of added features like accelerometers and pressure sensors to compensate for sliding in and out of a server rack while operating, as well as dealing with rapid pressure changes that take place when the server room door opens and the forced air circulation takes a quick detour. Those features just aren't needed in that home NAS sitting on your bookshelf. What *is* needed is a WD Caviar Green that has TLER, and Western Digital delivers that in their new Red drives.

End quote and back to reviewer.
I've got 5 of these in a Synology DiskStation 5-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage (DS1512+). It is really a sweet setup.

The Synology software has a S.M.A.R.T. test that can do surface scans to detect bad sectors. I have their Quick Test check every disk daily and the Extended Test set to automatically run on each of the 5 disks every weekend. (The Extended Test takes about 5 hours per disk so I separate the tests by 12 hours.)

96 of 104 people found the following review helpful.
Nice hard drives for NAS or storage server with RAID.
By T. Mccleary
If you're looking at this review, you're probably in the market for some honkin' big drives to stuff into a server or a NAS box. These Western Digital "Red" series drives are probably a total waste of money if you're planning to put them into a regular PC. If you're not doing a raid array of some kind, then save your money and buy the green or black series drives instead. If you're looking to set up a raid array of some sort, these are a bargain. They aren't the fastest drives, but they are rated to run 24x7 serving up data! Their 3 year warranty is above the current industry standard for consumer hard drives.

For my home-made FreeNAS (google it!) NAS/Server, I bought 5 WD Red drives from Adorama (purchased through Amazon) and 1 drive directly from Amazon.

The one drive from Amazon came very well packaged, double boxed in what looks like a WD cardboard box with a shock absorbing cradle. Very well packaged for shipment. Honestly, Amazon has been stellar for packaging boxes for shipment.

The 5 hard drives from Adorama came in a big box which 'clunked' when it was tilted. Opening the box revealed some big plastic pillow air strips, and 5 loose smaller boxes. Inside each of the smaller boxes was a few pillows and a factory bagged hard drive. There were not enough pillows in each box to securely cushion the hard drives against rattling around, so there's a high likelihood of damage in shipment. BAD SHIPPERS! NO DONUT!

Anyway, getting on to the performance of the drives... I'm running 6 drives in a ZFS RaidZ2 array. They are all controlled using an IBM M1015 PCIE 8x SATA 3 controller which has been flashed to be an HBA providing JBOD to the ZFS OS. That's a lotta acronyms! The speed of the array is quite fast... more than fast enough to saturate a gigabit network. I currently have about 5TB of data stored on the 10TB array.

On to the bad stuff...
One of the drives (I haven't checked the serial number to see which shipper it came from) is starting to give signs of premature failure after about 70 hours of operation. During a scrub of the data pool, drive DA5 is experiencing unreadable sectors. Luckily ZFS is able to calculate the correct values for the corrupted data, and is busily recreating the data onto another part of the drive. ZFS rocks for data reliability! If the drive does turn out to be bad, I have a WD Green 3TB drive that I can put into the array as a hot swap temporarily until the failed drive can be replaced. *UPDATE* The ZFS scrub just finished, and it repaired 1.53MB of data, with no data loss. Did I mention that ZFS rocks?

Warning/Advice about Data Storage:
Note 1: If you're going to be using these drives, or any data storage device for that matter, make sure that you take into account that these are highly fragile and delicate devices which can be easily damaged in shipment, or just plain up and fail when you least expect it. You really need to use some sort of redundant array of drives so that if one drive fails, your data doesn't vanish. In my case, the final configuration is going to be 6 drives in a RaidZ2 (dual parity striping), which means that my data stays intact and accessible even if 2 drives fail simultaneously. Also, there is going to be a 3TB Green drive as a hot spare that can take over for any failed drive in the array. With the hot-spare, my data can survive the loss of 3 drives without losing data (as long as the failures don't happen all at the same time).
Note 2: Always, always, always have a backup. In my case, I have two external 3TB USB3.0 drives which will be used only for backup purposes. Every so often, I'll backup the critical data onto the drives and stash them in my locker at work. If you don't have TrueCrypt, google it and see why your backup removable drives should be using it. If someone steals the drives, they only get the drives and not my data.

I'm giving 5 stars for the drives that work... 1 star for the failing drive... averages to about 4 stars score! I'll update this review once I have details on how the drives do in a week or so. Currently it ain't looking too good for drive DA5!

139 of 160 people found the following review helpful.
NAS Best Friend
By Simon
After about six months of searching for the perfect drive, I finally settled on two of these Western Digital Red 2TB WD20EFRX hard drives. I was ready to purchase HGST enterprise drives, the former Hitachi, but WD came out with these drives just in-time. I wanted to get the 3TB WD30EFRX version for my Synology DS212 NAS, but the price difference didn't make that much of a sense, and 2TB drives are more than enough for a few years of my home office use. I am very happy that these drives MTBFs are rated at 1,000,000 hours, they use less power, and they are cheaper than other enterprise drives.

Upon receiving, I immediately installed them in my NAS. It took about 15 minutes to install DSM 4 and begin the inspection process. I neither chose Raid 1, JBOD, or SHR, and I took some online advice and created two separate volumes, one on each disk, to have two independent file systems. In this case, you don't have to worry about rebuilding disk arrays if any drives fail, and you always have a backup present. I was planning on using Folder Sync feature to sync all folders from Disk 1 to Disk 2 every other hour, but I found out this feature only works on two independent Synology Disk Stations; however, you can use automated backup feature to backup data from Disk 1 into Disk 2, and it produces about the same result as Folder Sync does, and it gives you a few more options for backing up system and application files as well.

Synology volume creation took about 7 hours for each drive with automatic bad sector reallocation feature. I later tested each drive with S.M.A.R.T extended test--each took about 4 hours--and I am happy to report that I did not have any bad sectors on either of the drives. That is, the "Reallocated Sector Count" reads zero in S.M.A.R.T report.

The drives are surprisingly quiet. I had an enterprise RE2 500GB in my NAS, and it was thunderstorm loud compared to these. The temperature is also very reasonable. When the drive is resting it is about 31C/88F, and under heavy usage it rises up to 35C/95F. Although these drives speed are only 5000 rpm, I don't see any difference in file transfer speed. The only downside that I could sense was the startup time from sleep. I feel that compared to my old WD RE2 drive, it takes a good 2 to 5 seconds more for the NAS to come out of sleep each time. Not a deal breaker, but something to consider when you invest in these drives.

I think WD has done a good job with these drives, and they are currently the best on the market for home or home office use. That being said, I still think WD RE4 drives are the best enterprise drives and ultimate in performance; however, if you are looking for a good set of drives for your NAS, and the power consumption and noise are important to you, these WD Red drives will work just fine. Compared to desktop drives, these come with a few enterprise features that come in handy and will save you some time and money down the road.

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WD My Passport Slim 2TB Portable Metal External Hard Drive USB 3.0 with Auto and Cloud Backup (WDBPDZ0020BAL-NESN)

WD My Passport Slim 2TB Portable Metal External Hard Drive USB 3.0 with Auto and Cloud Backup (WDBPDZ0020BAL-NESN)..

Grab Now WD My Passport Slim 2TB Portable Metal External Hard Drive USB 3.0 with Auto and Cloud Backup (WDBPDZ0020BAL-NESN) By Western Digital

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40 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Better in just about everyway than my previous drive. Data and comparisons included
By Chris Zee Shutterbug
WD 1TB USB3 slim external HD.

I routinely mirror (backup entire drive vs just the data) on all the family computers. (Over the years two laptop drives failed and we had about half dozen drive by viruses that required very lengthy repairs). The external drive I use now is a Toshiba Cavio 1TB drive, Toshiba Canvio 1.0 TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive - HDTC610XK3B1 (Black)which is less than one year old and also USB3. I considered cloud backup, but at a midgrade internet cable connection, my upload speed (5-10 Mb/sec) is over 100 times slower than compared to using the external drives. I used CrystalDiskMark 3 software for comparing data rates.

The short story is that this WD drive almost 50% faster than the Toshiba (118 MB/s vs 80MB/sec). It is also 40% smaller (6.7cu inch vs 9.44, .496" thick). It also has a metal case rather than plastic, and as a consequence it's a teensy bit heavier at 5.6 vs 5.5 ounces.

Other plus is that it comes with a small black tie string silk carrying bag. Of the minuses, there is only one small one, the Toshiba had an activity light that glowed blue when plugged into a USB3 port and white when plugged into a USB2 port, the WD is always white.

Other notes. The USB cable is 19" long, and you can plug it into a USB2 plug or USB3 plug (the plastic on the inside of USB3 connector will be blue), however if use an existing USB cord (micro plug like on some phones) the data rate will only be USB2 speed. For USB3 speed you need to use the supplied cord, which has a double connector on the drive side, this is the same for the Toshiba drive. So how much do you give up when using USB3? Quite a lot, USB2 rate was 33 MB/s vs 118 or more than 3.5 times slower.

In summary this is the best external backup drive I have seen.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
A Passport Ultra Elegantly Repackaged (UPDATED)
By Stephanie Sullivan
I've been using WD My Passport Ultra 2TB drives to meet the backup needs for several of my clients' for a while. They are fast, reliable and compact. The My Passport Slim is essentially a My Passport Ultra in a slightly smaller and lighter package that is very attractive.

The Passport Slim became of interest when a client asked for a very portable external drive to take on the road where size and weight are especially important. The Passport Slim 2TB seemed a good fit for his purchase.

The Slim is "sexy and sleek" as it has been described in other reviews. It's about 1/8 inch thinner than the WD My Passport Ultra and just about 1/3 of an ounce lighter.

Like the Ultra it comes with a short cable, soft draw-string bag and has WD Smartware Pro on the drive for easy backup and sync to/from Dropbox (their "automatic cloud backup"). This Passport Slim drive was not purchased mainly for backup. It was intended to carry media, reference materials and work files on the road and as storage to off-load pictures.

To best take advantage of the My Passport Slim (or the WD My Passport Ultra) a USB 3.0 port is needed. Most modern laptops and desktops come with USB 3.0 built-in. Older computers can often be upgraded economically. I've used the ORICO PVU3-5O2I USB 3.0 7 Port PCI Express Card (5 Rear and Internal USB 3.0 20PIN Connector) on Windows 7 and Linux Desktops/Servers. If your laptop has an express card slot then a card like the HDE 2 Port USB 3.0 may provide USB 3.0 speeds to take full advantage of a drive like the My Passport Slim.

Having used Smartware on the Passport Ultra I find it a passable backup/sync tool. Calling a Dropbox client "automatic cloud backup" may be technically accurate, but I find it less than impressive.

The drive is very fast as is the My Passport Ultra. I did not run benchmarks on this drive. My time working with it was spent populating it with the files to be used in travel. With a USB 3.0 connection the drive felt much like the My Passport Ultra drive when copying files to and from the drive. Generally about 3X as fast as a USB 2.1 connected drive. The Passport Slim was more than fast enough for its intended purpose.

Here are the dimensions of the My Passport Slim and the My Passport Ultra from the WD site for comparison:
Passport Slim: H:0.70in, D:4.33in, W:3.14in, Weight 0.48lb
Passport Ultra: H:0.823in, D:4.35in, W:3.23in, Weight 0.50lb

Is the Passport Slim worth a 30% higher price, even with a more "sexy" look? The Slim is a slightly thinner and lighter version of the My Passport Ultra and for me I'm not sure. It does seems worth the extra for my client who really likes the drive.

If being ultra-portable or cool looking isn't important save about $35 (at the time I write this) and get the WD My Passport Ultra 2TB instead. If cool is worth the extra cost go for the Passport Slim. Both drives have virtually identical performance and features outside of the packaging differences.

Because the Passport Slim does what it's supposed to with very nice "style" the WD Passport Slim gets 5 stars from me.

Hope this is helpful!

Update: Mar 6, 2014
The price differential on Amazon is down to about $30 now for the 2TB Slim over the My Passport Ultra. Good looks and smaller size has become a more affordable.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Dual Toned SuperSpeed Slim Beauty!
By rbhatta
WD is known for making excellent quality hard disk drives. I have owned several WD internal desktop and external drives in the past and never had any drives fail till date. This Passport Slim portable 1TB capacity with metal top is very well made and will provide years of service. I do like the new dual tone metal design. The drive is small enough to fit in your shirt pocket and has large 1TB capacity.

The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface makes the drive work even faster on PCs and Laptops that have USB 3.0 interface and is fully backward compatible with older USB 2.0 interfaces. I ran some benchmark tests using HDTUNE application and here are the results:

(*)Using USB 2.0 Read Speeds: Min: 29.2 MB/s, Max: 31.2 MB/s
(*)Using USB 2.0 Write Speeds: Min: 14.5 MB/s, Max: 22.6 MB/s

(*)Using USB 3.0 Read Speeds: Min: 96.6 MB/s, Max: 106.3 MB/s
(*)Using USB 3.0 Write Speeds: Min: 54.6 MB/s, Max: 79.2 MB/s

The spindle rotational speed reported by HDTUNE application is 5400RPM. The drive runs cool even after extended period of time as the metal surface helps dissipate heat evenly. This is an 'USB BUS' powered drive. You do not need any external power adapter to run the drive and this makes it very portable.

PROS
[+] Very attractive dual tone design, Slim portable and comes with a carrying pouch.
[+] Does not need external power source. Runs with USB bus power.
[+] Speedy especially when used with SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface.
[+] 3 years warranty

CONS
[-] It does not have rubber feet on the bottom and could scratch the bottom surface eventually.
[-] This drive uses WD proprietary hardware interface. Data recovery could be challenging if the interface were to fail especially if you enable hardware encryption.

When it comes to software included in the drive, you get 'WD Drive' Utilities, 'WD Security' and 'WD SmartWare Pro' backup software. These apps allow you to choose when and where you backup your data, The apps also allows you to password protect and encrypt the files on the drive or run disk drive diagnostics etc; You can also use your 'Dropbox' account to back up your files to the 'cloud' as an offsite backup.

Overall this drive performs well. It is priced right for 1TB capacity. Four Star Product! Recommended.

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