Western Digital My Passport Essential SE-1TB Portable Hard Drive

At first glance, there really isn't much in the Western Digital Passport drive that captured our fancy. It looks decidedly plain and boring for one thing, and a closer look at its price tag gave us more reason to pass it over. Nevertheless, there is something about the latest offering from Western Digital that warrants closer investigation, and as it turns out, the drive does offer a number of benefits that make it easier to overlook its vanilla looks and steep price tag. Let's take a closer look!

Drive Design
One area where the Passport drive redeems itself is in its size. Portable drives are almost always miniscule by design of course, and the Passport drive definitely measures up...or measures down as the case may be! This is one of the most compact printable drives that we have seen, and you should have no trouble carrying it around with you wherever you go. Western Digital adopts a decidedly Spartan approach to this drive, and there is a distinct lack of features and protrusions that you would expect to find in many other drives in this class. In fact, the only thing that Western Digital provides by way of connectivity is a single USB connector.

Drive Features
Visually plain as it may be, this only caused us to look more closely into the Passport drive's storage features. This is definitely one of the most generously sized portable drives on the market, and the 1TB model that we reviewed offers more than enough storage for even the most demanding users. Western Digital also offers the Passport drive in 750GB capacities, which offers the same functionality with slightly reduced storage space.

Drive Software
The My Passport drive comes with Western Digital's own SmartWare software, which performs multiple backup, data encryption and data display functions. We had a little trouble getting the drive recognized on our Windows 7 equipped test machine, although after we got it up and running, we were pleased to see that it scans all your drives automatically while providing a visual display of all the file types present. In addition to giving you at-a-glance feedback on how much space you have left, this also lets you know how much disk real estate your pictures, music, and movies occupy.

Drive Performance
Further testing of the backup software revealed that SmartWare is one of the easiest to use and most straightforward solutions around. It is a simple matter to back up all or part of your data, and we were pleasantly surprised with how hassle free the entire procedure was. Data backup is arguably one of the most boring aspects of computer maintenance, but we foresee ourselves performing this tedious-yet-essential operation a lot more often, thanks to the ease of use and simplicity of the SmartWare software.

The Bottom Line
The Western Digital Passport drive generally provides a quick and simple solution to your storage needs, and the included backup software is a much welcome bonus that we will certainly have a use for. While the looks of the drive and its high price tag gave us reason to consider other options, there is no denying that this is a serious contender in the portable storage arena.


If you need more information about portable hard drives such as the interfaces (USB, Firewire, etc), cache and more, there is a lot of info on terabyte-drives.com. You can also find many hard drives for $150 or less.

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