WD 1TB Black My Passport Ultra Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBGPU0010BBK-NESN

Back to the days of plug and pray I guess. Hooked this up to my PC running Windows Vista. Had trouble loading driver software (hung up). Left it plugged in and restarted my PC - Windows operating system hung up on black screen until I unplugged the drive. Apparently it Windows was trying to boot through the drive! If I attache it AFTER Windows has started, I can use it to store data, but must remove it after using and before shutting down - or else my PC hangs on the black screen again. Using their (WDs) website to correct this (apparently known) problem just caused more headaches. Would not recommend. Update 1/9/18 - Works just fine with my new Windows 10 PC. Upgraded to 4 stars.

I always reformat these into Apple journaled format and I setup 2 partitions. One partition is just a little bigger than my system drive on my laptop.... on this laptop it was 256Gb SSD. That leaves another 1.7 Tb partition for external storage. These Passport Ultra Drives are super fast at USB 3 and work well with Apple laptops when completely erased and reformatted. Im sure they work fine as they come, which is HFS+. I dont like any of the software WD includes, its just my personal taste, and what I want the drive to do. I set up the Backup partition to be my TImeMachine drive, and then my laptop is always backing up to this drive. I like that, because if I disconnect the drive, the autobackup on Timemachine is set to only backup if the drive is connected. That way, if I dont want to lose CPU bandwidth because of hourly backups, and I dont want to have to remember to tell the backup drive to STOP backing up, I can just attach the drive when Im not active on any laptop, and leave the laptop plugged in. We have around 4 or 5 laptops setup like this at our house (Kids,Wife,Husband, etc ) - all work flawlessly.

My main purpose for purchasing this product was to obtain a portable back up device for my basic data files as well as my extensive collection of art images I create by editing my landscape photographs. I also wanted a USB 3.0 device to expedite the transfer of files. This product has met all of my expectations in that regard. It is compact and very nicely styled. Its large capacity has allowed me to backup all of my basic data files as well as my hundreds of HD photographs and the art images I have created from them. When I am editing the photographs, I use the files that are on this product as my base images and create multiple art images from the photographs. The USB 3.0 file transfer speeds are super fast and have significantly reduced the time it takes to edit my images compared to my previous USB 2.0 device. I am totally satisfied with this product and would recommend it to my family and friends.

Overall it is good product. Failed after over 2 yrs (almost 3 yrs). During these years, I have to let windows repair it and re-format 3 time to re-use it. At the end, I download hard drive tools form wd site to test. The tool said it good, passed but can not performed the extended test. Bad tools.

Every tech needs one of these. You dont need to use the software included which is a plus for vme as I like to chose. Excellent transfer rates with 3.0 usb. If your motherboard puts out low voltage as my Asus 79 Delux on the 2.0 but the 3.0s work fine on most. use the drivers on the WD site to get it to work. Works on 90% of all pcs without drivers. No AC needed one cord although proprietary. I recommend the accessory rubber case (WD Grip Pack) available on Amazon in multiple colors that comes with a extra cord also. It protect it and you get he extra cord. Pros Size 3.0 Transfer speed Cons proprietary cables.

Im a faithful Western Digital consumer. I have purchased this brand to replace internal desktop HDs, the My Book line for archiving and game console storage, and now this handy little unit for my new laptop. It is extremely light and quick. Unfortunately Im not techie enough to give speed ratings and such... only that the unit is fast and quiet. I am happy that the weight is light as I tote this in my laptop bag or purse daily. It weighs less than my portable trackball mouse, so thats helpful. I did purchase the OEM bumper protection accessory too when does help to grip this unit. Its smooth plastic body can be a challenge to hold on to. I highly recommend getting this accessory. All in all this is a great unit for a reasonable price. Not much higher in price on Amazon compared to other sites. The purchase experience, tracking, and easy returns is why I prefer shopping on Amazon.

I am not a super picky tech pro but i have had this device for several years and still works just fine so that counts as great in my book. Disk drives are either 5 stars from me if they last for a long time or 1 star if they break and loose my data, is very clear cut for me, one or the other because i simply need them to store my data safely and dont care about nitpicking other techie details about performance. Ive been using it everyday just plugged as an extra storage space for my desktop so i havent been traveling with it, have never dropped it or hit it, it always sits on the same safe spot but i download and open stuff from it every day so ive used it constantly for quite a long time now and it still working dandy so i would not ask for more.

I found the product to deficient. It comes with very inflexible backup software. Worst of all, it does not properly recover the backed up files! After purchasing a new laptop, I shrank and partitioned my laptop’s hard drive partition. I moved all of my data files from my old laptop, from my Maxtor backup, and from other sources onto folders on my new drive partition. I installed the WD software. I attempted a backup. I was amazed at how inflexible the supplied backup software is! One can backup the entire system, or some system folders on a drive’s partition, or a drive’s entire partition. First of all, I do not want a complete backup. I just wanted to backup my data partition. Secondly, I have no idea on how to specify a “system folder”. Thus, not all of my root folders, on my secondary data partition, were selectable. Thirdly, I did not want to back up an entire partition. I settled for backing up the entire newly created laptop’s data partition. The backup went well. I performed several automated backups. These incremental backups went well. I wanted a smaller primary partition and a larger secondary partition on my laptop. Thus, I, again, shank and partitioned new laptop’s primary partition again. In order to get a single larger secondary partition, I had to delete my current secondary partition, which contains all of my laptop data. I then joined the two new partitions into a single (and larger) partition and formatted this new partition. I felt that I was safe. New laptop, new backup drive, and tested software, why not? I had about 139gb of data on my WD drive. Using the WD software, I attempted a recovery three times. All three failed with a message, which suggested that I check the cable or the USB port. I panicked! I decided to use the Windows 10 software for recovery. I really panicked. By mistake, I selected CUT instead of COPY! After the files were moved, I looked at the dates on my files. They were clobbered. Some dates were correct. Most dates were the date of my original backup. The WD backup was empty! I had no options except to back up my files with clobbered dates onto the WD backup! This backup worked just fine. It is too bad that the WD recovery software failed three times. Note that the same cable and same port, which was used for the three failed WD recoveries, was used for the Windows 10 recovery and the WP backup. Does this smell like rotten software? Or, does it smell like possibly bad hardware? All I know is it smells. Now, the vast majority of my files on my laptop and my WD backup drive have clobbered date information. I would suggest using this product only if you are not going to do a recovery!

This is the first time I have ever bought an external hard drive. Did not really know what to expect from this thing but gave it a shot. Ive been using this thing for a while now and have not run into any problems with it at all. I was a little nervous because I used sd cards a lot and always get a notification that something is wrong with the card or that theres a card reading error or something like that. However I have not received anything like that with this thing. I am into media and music so I use it for storing extra project files, movies, videos, and pictures that I am working on. I use it between my surface pro tablet and laptop a lot but have not run into any errors or complications what so ever. I take very good care of it so it is always in my backpack or at home. I never dropped it so I dont know how sturdy it really is but seems like it was built with good quality in mind. It looks very nice, small, and is very light and easy to carry around. Overall a great buy.

This gets four stars instead of five because there is a major glitch with the included software that comes installed on the drive. Additionally, it is purported to be formatted for Mac but did not function properly out of the box (could have just been my computer, but I doubt it). RECOMMENDATIONS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ If you ordered this for something like a Macbook Pro, as soon as you get it and plug it in, delete the software on the disc and reformat it to Mac OS X Journaled. IF YOU PLAN TO COPY OVER TO THIS NEW STORAGE THE CONTENTS OF AN OLD EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE, CHECK THE FORMAT OF THE OLD DRIVE: If the old drive is formatted as a case-sensitive device, format this new drive as case-sensitive as well. Otherwise, the transfer will not work. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Otherwise, the drive is great and works as expected. Great deal for 2 TB. The read/write speeds are 8-9 times slower than my internal Samsung 850 EVO SDD, but that is 1) expected and 2) not a noticable factor in day-to-day use.