Western Digital My Passport Elite 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAC5000ACH-NESN (Charcoal)

Review by J. Riga for Western Digital My Passport Elite 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAC5000ACH-NESN (Charcoal)
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This is a great little drive! It quickly and easily added 500GB to my MacBook Air once I made some modifications to Western Digital’s setup process. The drive powers itself on a single USB port, unlike some other drives that need two. The drive is totally silent, no vibration, and the included dock is decent but the glossy finish looks odd with the matte finish on the drive itself.

The area WD needs to improve is in SOFTWARE. Every single time you plug this drive in, it mounts a virtual CD on the desktop. You can’t turn it off with the drive software. To remove it, you literally have to drag the icon to the trash every single time (reformatting the drive doesn’t work). It took me 10 mins on Google to find that WD has a utility to unmount it permanently for both Windows and Mac – it’s buried within their site. Downloading this utility and running it FINALLY got rid of the CD icon on my desktop. Frustrating!

WD also provides backup software, but it just isn’t anywhere as nice as Time Machine on the Mac or the backup solution for Windows 7. There are also drivers you can install to replace the stock icons on the desktop with WD icons showing how much of the drive is being used. These were the least invasive of WD’s software, but added no real value to the drive.

That’s 3 DIFFERENT pieces of software to configure. To use a USB hard drive. That’s about 3 too many, for my tastes!

The status LEDs on the drive itself are a bit wonky too. There are four LEDs to indicate how much drive space has been taken up. One: They ONLY work if you install the WD software, otherwise they just stay dark. Two: Even when they’re on, they make zero sense.

You might think with 4 LEDs that as you filled the drive up, they would light (and stay lit)… kind of like filling up a glass with water. The more in the glass, the more LEDs are lit. This is NOT the case. LED 1 is 0%-25%. LED 2 is 25%-50%. You see where this is going. Only a single LED stays lit, and from any more than 6 inches away you can see WHICH LED is lit: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Could have been a neat feature, but again, software killed it.

To make this drive useful and not frustrating I ended up removing ALL Western Digital software from my Mac, reformatting the drive with Disk Utility, giving up on use of the LEDs on the front, and letting Mac OS manage the backups and the drive itself.

Once you remove all trace of Western Digital software, you’re left with a normal, small, quiet hard drive that works great for backups and storage, fits in my (small) laptop bag with little weight added, and looks nice!

The drive gets 5 STARS. The software gets 1 STAR.

Review by Robert S. Tobias for Western Digital My Passport Elite 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAC5000ACH-NESN (Charcoal)
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You’ll hate it… If you’re looking for a general purpose portable USB drive. There are smaller, less expensive, and more solidly built drives around. For example Seagate FreeAgent Go 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive ST905003FAA2E1-RK (Black) or SimpleTech by Hitachi Signature Mini 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive FS-U25/500E (Espresso). Also, you *need* to use the cables provided with the drive. That’s either the long one that’s attached to the cradle (the cradle that will tip over in a stiff breeze and doesn’t connect to the drive all that well) or the short (18″) cable. You need to use those cables for a couple reasons, first because the disk-side connector is non-standard and because the manual cautions you, several times, to use only those cables. I suspect the requirement to use their cables may have helped motivate their choice of connectors.

You’ll love it… If you are not a netbook user and looking for a portable drive that will easily install and connect to your desktop/laptop and include robust and reliable encryption, backup, and restore (let’s not forget that part) software. The built-in software isn’t as feature rich (read usually confusing) as some dedicated backup programs. However, it does get the job done and is very clear about what is happening. Further, using the supplied high quality cable means you don’t have to use an external power supply or tie up two USB ports as you do with some portable drives. Finally, the cradle can be very handy for road warriors who like to capture data from their disk-side machines and use it with their laptops as they travel. This is also when the robust encryption component can be very important.

So, if you need the extra features then the extra cost us justified. If you just want an additional disk to store some DVDs then there are better choices. I didn’t feel like writing two reviews so I averaged everything and hope this description will be useful to anyone trying to figure out if this drive is right for them.

Review by Jack for Western Digital My Passport Elite 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAC5000ACH-NESN (Charcoal)
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WD is doing a terrible job in marketing the new Passport drives. Things they leave people guessing which should be better communicated:

1. The drive to cable interface is micro-USB, NOT proprietary. This means I can use the cable from my Nokia cell phone and vice versa.

2. The firmware prevents you from deleting factory loaded contents, but later WD issued a firmware update to allow it. One star off for the irritation.

3. The drive IS really much smaller than before. There should be a side-by-side pictorial. This is because the HDD circuit board has USB on-board. Less space, power, reliability, and performance costs than traditional SATA drives with added USB-SATA interface adapter. Minor consequence is being unable to use it internally as a notebook PC drive.

4. 3 year warranty. I’m not sure if this is 3-year drive/1-year other components warranty or full warranty. Seagate disguises their 1 year warranty as a 5-year by charging you for “non-drive” defects after the first year (5-years on the drive/1-year on all components other than the drive).

I wonder what becomes of the tons of returned drives WD/Seagate seems to get recently? From a consumer’s point of view, this year’s external drive products make little sense.

Review by Gadgester for Western Digital My Passport Elite 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAC5000ACH-NESN (Charcoal)
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This WD portable hard drive stands out from other USB-powered portable drives in two regards: first, it features 256-bit hardware encryption; second, it’s truly *ultra* slim, about the size and weight of the original iPod 5GB (maybe a little lighter — I can’t quite remember). (My workhorse Toshiba 640 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Dive HDDR640E04XR, for comparison, is about the size of an iPhone.)

Out of box, the drive is formatted in the NTFS format and Windows reports 465GB total space on the storage partition. Another 569MB is on a separate partition which houses the WD SmartWare drive control utility and shows up as a CD-ROM drive. It’s through this utility that you can turn on encryption, back up data, etc.

Installing the drive on my Vista machine hit a small hiccup: Vista displayed a dialog box saying the driver must be located online. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that the encryption driver on the WD drive needed some updated Windows driver. I think WD should have made this installation smoother; an inexperienced PC user would have been realy worried by the mysterious dialog box.

Once installed, I had no trouble using the storage partition. Transfer speed is slower than my Seagate, Toshiba and previous WD portable drives — my unscientific estimate is about 30% less on average. Writing to the WD, in particular, seems to be slow. Others have reported seeing speed increases after formatting the drive; I haven’t tried that yet, as I plan to use this drive to back up sensitive personal files, with encryption, so speed is not a top issue for me in this usage scenario. (My Kingston DataTraveler Vault Privacy Edition 4 GB USB 2.0 Flash Drive DTVP/4GB (Blue) is also much slower than other flash drives, so my guess is the encryption drivers in these drives slow things down, even when you don’t use encryption.)

I have some older WD portable drives and find them very reliable, so I have no doubt this is another reliable drive. Two minor complaints: 1) the drive can run pretty hot, so one needs to be cautious when handling it; 2) the USB connector is of a proprietary kind, so you must use the included USB cable or dock, not a standard mini-USB cable.

In short, I find the WD Elite drive ultra portable, stylish, and easy to use, once I understood the driver installation process. If you need encrypted backups or an iPod-like small footprint, this small hard drive is the way to go. If you need speed, consider Toshiba’s portable USB hard drives.

Review by Renjan Bhasi for Western Digital My Passport Elite 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAC5000ACH-NESN (Charcoal)
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I got this item shipped within 2 days after ordering. The drive is really cool, small and compact for a 500GB drive. The software for installation is fine, I didn’t get any problem and I could start transferring my files immediately. The speed of transfer is also good. It took just 45 sec to transfer a movie of 2GB size. I got what I was looking for.

Review by Del K. Kelley for FreeAgent Desk for Mac – Hard drive – 500 GB – external – 3.5″ – FireWire / FireWire 800 / Hi-Speed USB – 7200 rpm – silver
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I have the FreeAgent Desk 500GB Mac. The only software I’ve needed for the drive is Time Machine.

It started right up with Time Machine backups. I have it hooked directly to my iMac via Firewire 400. The drive goes to sleep when the computer sleeps and awakens when the computer does. I have it partitioned into 2 partitions – one for backups and one for video files (which I back up on DVD’s). The drive is completely quiet.

As an aside, my wife has been wirelessly backing up her MacBook to a Seagate FreeAgent Go 150GB drive that we got last year — it was PC formatted and I changed it to Mac OS Extended Journaled and it has been flawless for almost a year now — it is USB-connected to an AirPort Extreme Base Station.

The 5-year limited warranty offered by Seagate is also great.

Note: if the drive doesn’t sleep when the computer does, you may just need to check “Put the hard disks to sleep when possible” in the “Energy Saver” settings of “System Preferences” and also shorten the times for screen sleep and computer sleep if it bothers you to have the drive light on when you aren’t using the computer.

Review by Eastnortheast for FreeAgent Desk for Mac – Hard drive – 500 GB – external – 3.5″ – FireWire / FireWire 800 / Hi-Speed USB – 7200 rpm – silver
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Absolutely no problems with this hard drive. I bought it specifically to use with the Time Machine function on my Mac. I could have spent a bit less and gotten an equivalent sized hard drive that was not configured for the Mac, but being an beginner/intermediate computer user, I wanted something that would work with minimal input on my side.

I have not been disappointed. There is not much documentation that comes with the hard drive itself; just a “quick start” guide. However, that is enough. Out of the box, I plugged it into my iMac via the firewire connection, clicked on Time Machine and presto, it was done.

I have had it running for about a month – it has basically been invisible. It runs in the background doing automatic backups and I really dont even know that it is there.

The hard drive is quiet, and takes up hardly any space on my desk. It is styled so that it fits in very well with the brushed metallic look of the iMac. It does require its’ own power source, though this is a minor inconvenience.

All in all, I give it 5 starts.

Review by Allan Ray Miller for FreeAgent Desk for Mac – Hard drive – 500 GB – external – 3.5″ – FireWire / FireWire 800 / Hi-Speed USB – 7200 rpm – silver
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Took it out of the box, plugged it into a power strip and into my 13″ aluminum Macbook, configured it for Time Machine backups, and it has been working great ever since. Simple.

I really liked the 5 year warranty. To me that was the key selling point. All disk drives have some failure rate, and you can find complaints against all manufacturers. But most vendors ship their products with 1 or 2 year warranties at most. I researched many other products and was delighted to see that Seagate is willing to stand behind their products for that extended warranty duration. My suggestion is before you buy a disk drive, any drive, check out the manufacturer’s web site for the warranty information first.

Review by L. Chuss for FreeAgent Desk for Mac – Hard drive – 500 GB – external – 3.5″ – FireWire / FireWire 800 / Hi-Speed USB – 7200 rpm – silver
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Seagate ST305005FJA105-RK FreeAgent Desk for Mac 500 GB USB 2.0/FW800 External Hard Drive (Silver) Installation was easy as pie with Firewire. Took about 4 hours for 150MB backup on an iMac. I didn’t bother trying to use the software but got Super Duper.

Review by hatdegs for FreeAgent Desk for Mac – Hard drive – 500 GB – external – 3.5″ – FireWire / FireWire 800 / Hi-Speed USB – 7200 rpm – silver
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After reading mixed reviews on every single external hard drive i considered, i decided to go with the seagate on a friend’s recommendation and because of the 5 year warranty.

I partitioned the drive – part for my itunes library, part for time machine backups. The automatic power save feature works well – the drive sleeps when it’s not in use. It just takes a few seconds to wake up when i open itunes. It’s only been a few days, but my experience with this drive has been great so far.