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

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.

When I first got this drive, it was an absolute lifesaver. I was able to save all my important documents, photos, videos, etc. from the last 10 years in one place and thought all my storage worries were over. At the time, I had very recently lost an extremely close person in my life and all the photos, videos, etc. that I and her family had of her were on this device, including all things pertaining to her funeral. All my financial and tax documents were on this device. There were an abundance of legal documents pertaining to a law suit I had filed saved on this device. And I was able to store other client information/documents so I could have their files easily accessible in case anything came up while I was not at the office, considering I am on call quite often. Before and after purchasing this particular device, I had done pretty extensive research to ensure I used it properly at all times and always followed all the recommendations and suggestions of Western Digital and others on WDs official forums. I even purchased a hard top, waterproof case to store the drive in, just for the added security because of the importance of the files on the drive. Literally not even an entire TWO MONTHS into owning this device, the problems began. One day I got to work and went to open an important financial document, but it said the file could not be found because it had either been moved or deleted. I knew for a fact that not one file had been moved or deleted, so I started trying to open files throughout different folders saved on the device. Everything but TWO files were unable to be accessed due to being moved or deleted. I was hopeful that maybe it was just a fluke, so I ejected the device and left it alone. Two days later, I tried using the device again, but this time my computer would not even recognize the device at all, no matter which way I tried to search for it. The light indicating it is on and plugged in was on and you could hear the device running, but the computer could not find it. I rapidly started searching through all of WDs official forums and at their suggestions, I tried using multiple different cables to connect the device and each time it was still unrecognizable. Ive also tried it on over 10 different computers and laptops and it is always unable to be found, yet the light still indicates it is on and you can hear it running each time. Im still within my warranty period, but I am absolutely livid that so many sentimental and highly important/confidential files have been lost. I purchased this drive to prevent losing these files because of their importance, and the EXACT thing I was looking to avoid, happened. When I purchased this drive, there were countless positive reviews and people raved about this drive. Now that some time has passed and Ive lost these files, Ive since gone through the reviews again to find there are now many people changing their reviews, claiming to have experienced the same thing. There are even threads on other websites saying theyve experienced the same issues and have expressed their disgust with the way Western Digital has handled the issues. I hope this review can save at least one person from having to deal with the same issues the majority of us buyers have experienced. I absolutely do not recommend this product and will probably never recommend another Western Digital product to anyone; not only because of the product failure, but mainly due to the way Western Digital handles their failures and and show that they simply do not care about their customers.

This drive is exactly what we needed. My son has a MacBook that he wanted to configure TimeMachine to backup and he needed a target drive. We plugged this one in, reformatted it (it came formatted NTFS), and told TimeMachine to use it. Done. Power is supplied via the USB connection, so there is just one cable to connect to the MacBook. As long as he connects it to his laptop every few days, it stays up to date and were all good. We didnt install any of the WD tools or anything. Were just using it as a simple backup target, so I am not sure about any of the other features. Time Machine will encrypt the drive on its own.

A really nice back-up drive! Easy to use, and I would have given 5 stars but for one thing. If you install the software on the drive, it doesnt have a feature for just moving certain files to the drive. Only back-up and restore. I dont want to back up my computer because Im switching and dont want all the files associated with it. But, it works flawlessly (so far) when I just move files to it. The price was there, quality is there, and delivered very quickly! I may get another one.

Terrible product and terrible tech support from Western Digital. I continue to get an error message that all my files have failed to back up. I called Western Digital about this and she told me to close all programs. That did not solve the problem. I still get the error messages and I get very sarcastic help from Western Digital. When i try to remove the hard drive I get a message that the program is still running or an error message that I cant connect sometimes both. I would really like to return the product but it has files that have backed up and so I cant really return it unless I take it to my IT people at a cost to wipe it. I am very unhappy with this. I have used 2 other companies back up drives but told WD was the best, not for me. My other two hard drives were never a problem. Also I use a remote back up and that stopped backing up files when the WD is connected, I never had the problem before with other hard drive. I assume its the software not the actual drive.Yesterday I spoke with their tech dept yet again and they gave me directions for wiping the hard drive. It said it would take 139 hours which I think is a bit long to put 0s on a hard drive to wipe out data. During the night there was an error message that I discovered when I awoke this morning so I clicked on continue. It continues to run at a snails pace, I called again and was told the hard drive had many bad sectors. This is hardly Amazons fault. WD is supposed to have excellent external back ups so something needs to be fixed in their quality control dept. The Passport hard drive is on its way back to Amazon.

It like it well enough for my PC. Plenty of space for the amount of stuff I have. The only problem is, I didnt buy it for myself, I bought it for my husband when he got a new computer after his old one died, but it doesnt seem to be compatible with his MacBook Air. We tried reformatting it several times but still could not get it to work for him. We finally gave up and he bought himself a different one that specifically stated it was for Macs to make sure we wouldnt have issues. If Id known it wouldnt work for his computer then I wouldnt have bought it.

I signed up for Carbonite backup and chose an option to mirror my hard drive so when it crashed again (I went through it once, it is a piece of hard ware and probably will fail again) I wanted to be able to reinstall the entire contents of my hard drive rather than TRY to remember what I had on it and not have to spend 3 weeks trying to rebuild it. One of the things I had to have to do the mirroring was a portable hard drive. I spent a lot of time trying to find something that I could use, a friend recommended this drive, I bought it and it works just fine. I does act a little weird though but I unplug it and it goes back to normal again.

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.

Pros: Works with USB 2.0 and 3.0, which is what you would expect. But its hard to find that info here. So there you have it. Come pre-partitioned for NTFS, with loads of government spyware for windows. I wiped it out and partitioned for Ext4 to use it for Linux. Works when directly connected to my Raspberry Pi 2 Model B without a hub (once I modified /boot/config.txt and added max_usb_current=1). Cons: The only thing I can think of to complain about is the activity LED seems like it should be on the opposite end of the drive as the cable, but it isnt. Its also illuminated when there is no activity, but blinks off and on when there is activity. Its also quite bright when you look right at it, though it doesnt seem to illuminate a dark room in an annoying way. The LED is white. WD My Passport 1 TB vs WD Elements 1TB I had a hard time choosing between this WD My Passport and the

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!