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A luxurious soft-touch finish makes these drives easy to grip, comfortable to hold, and beautiful to show off to your friends. Combine that with mega-capacity that fits in your pocket, plus four powerful features -- capacity gauge, automatic backup, sync and encryption, and remote access Software -- and you'll understand why we call these little drives Elite. Capacity Gauge allows you to connect My Passport to your Computer and see at a glance how much space is available on your drive. Save a copy of your photos to an online sharing service, duplicate your E-mail and contacts to your iPod, and back up all the precious files on your computer to your My Passport. Set it and forget it; every time you plug your My Passport into your computer your Data is automatically backed up. WD Sync synchronization and encryption software lets you take your critical data with you. Plug My Passport into any PC, Edit files, read e-mail, and view photos. Then sync all of your changes back to your home or office computer. Your data is protected with 128-bit encryption. (Windows only) Connect My Passport to any PC and run MioNet Key software to remotely access files, music, and photos from any of your Computers with MioNet software installed. This compact drive fits easily in your pocket or purse, weighs only a few ounces, and with capacities up to 500 GB, you can take approximately 91,000 photos, 24 hours of videos, 80,000 songs, or tons of files with you wherever you go. You can even plug My Passport into the USB port on your gaming console to play your music or view photo and video files on your TV.
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Technical Details
- Powered by the USB bus- USB 2.0 and 1.1 Interface
- 500GB Hard Drive
- Soft-touch finish
- Automatic backup
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By Thomas Cragholm (East Bay, CA)
I don't use the gauge, nor any of the software. But for the extra $20 I'd rather have the 5 year warranty that comes with the elite drives (opposed to 3 yr for standard passport drives). I have important stuff on my drives (I have 3 of them) and I'm assuming there using better quality components if there offering 5 years instead of 3. A risk I'm willing to take ... or not take.
By Donald J. DEGRACIA (Royal Oak, MI USA)
Drive is perfect in every respect. As others have said, it is dead quite, and gives off very little heat. Small and portable, it fits easily in my carry bag, even when its in its hard shell case. Powers via a single USB 2 cord also used for data transfer. If you have any doubts, don't. This thing is best of breed at the moment. Oh, also, I reformatted it for full capacity. I don't use any of the included backup features or software. I use Acronis TrueImage Home for backing up, and I just wanted the full 500GB for backing up my laptop and storing movies and music and stuff.
By Ben (Miami, FL)
After shopping around for quite awhile, i decided to settle with this portable hard drvie because of its price, measurements, size and weight. So far it has been very good. Transfer rates are quick, it runs quietly and had not given me any problems. This unit is small enough to fit in a back pocket, front shirt pocket or front pouch of a bookbag. It weighs less than half a pound. If traveling with it often i would recommend investing in a protective carrying case.
Pros: Size, Weight, Capacity Gage, No External Power Source
Cons: The software bundled with the unit is complicated, un-user friendly and not very clear on what each one does.
I use this product just as a backup for video and music files and it does the job well. I just drag and drop files as if it were an extra drive. Its much easier than trying to figure out what each of the different softward programs does. For me its perfect. For someone who needs automatic backup, you might want to read into the included software before investing in this unit.
By NLee the Engineer (Nashua, NH)
The main difference between the WD Passport Elite and the slightly cheaper Passport Essential is in the pre-loaded software. Both versions include sync and encryption software, but only the Passport Elite comes with the "WD Anywhere" automatic backup software. However, if your main reason for buying the Passport Elite is to use it as a data backup drive for your PC, you better think twice - details on that later.
What's so excellent about the hardware?
SIZE: The drive is so compact and light, it can fit in my shirt pocket easily.
CONNECTION: Just a simple USB cable takes care of both power and data. The provided cable is only 15 inches long, but I have tried a generic 30-inch USB cable and it works just fine.
SPEED: I benchmarked the data transfer rate to be 30MB/s for writing large files. This is about as good as it can get for a 5400RPM hard drive connected through USB 2.0.
NOISE: What noise? I have to put my ear right on the hard drive, in order to heard a faint sound during read/write.
What's not so hot about the WD Anywhere backup software?
Initially, the WD Anywhere software appears to be a 30-day trial version. It turns out that on-line registration is required to activate the full version. Fair enough, except that my virus protection program blocked this software from accessing the Internet. So I have to temporarily suspend the virus protection in order to register.
Next, I started to backup selected directories on my PC. The software seems to get 'stuck' after transferring just a few GB of data. It would consume over 60% of my computer's CPU power, yet the files are just crawling along. I restarted the process a few times, but the results are the same. Finally, I downloaded the latest WD Anywhere Backup version 3.50, and it doesn't hang up anymore. However, there are still problems when using this automatic backup software.
Suppose I transfer some image files from my camera to my PC, while the portable hard drive is not connected. WD Anywhere will queue-up those files for backup later, once the drive is connected. The problem is: if I rename/edit those files in the mean time, WD Anywhere is not smart enough to update its queue accordingly. So it will try unsuccessfully to backup those old files, and it will NOT backup those new files I have edited. It is ironic that the backup software for a PORTABLE hard drive requires the drive to be connected all the time. I have yet to find a way to force the software to rescan my directory and look for new files to backup. It is easier for me to just copy the whole directory manually.
The bottom line is, WD Passport Elite is still an excellent USB hard drive. Just remember that you cannot rely on WD Anywhere to backup all your files automatically.
[Update on April 4th]
Thanks to suggestion by William E. Merkley II, I downloaded a free program called 'SyncToy' (part of the Microsoft PowerToys suite). It works exactly the way I want to backup my photo files. I have already deleted the WD Anywhere backup program and will only use SyncToy from now on.
[Update on May 25th, 2009]
I tried using this hard drive connecetd to the USB port of my Philips DVP5990 DVD Player. The DVD player can detect there is an USB device connected, but it cannot read anything from the device. I think the fault is with the USB port of this player. It seems unable to supply the 500mA current required, therefore the hard drive cannot spin up. For this application, I need to get an USB hard drive with its own power supply instead.
By Robert York (Westlake, Oh USA)
The reviewer who said that this product is identical as the WD Passport Essential (other than the soft finish) is incorrect. The two big features that are included with the Elite are backup software and a capacity gauge. You also get remote access software (no biggie for me). The capacity gauge is nice to have and the backup software is a good investment. Great product that works like the Eveready Bunny.
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Buy Western Digital WDMLZ5000TN 500GB My Passport Elite 2MB Cache 2.5-Inch USB 2.0 Hard Disk Drive (Bronze) Now
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