Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Review of WD My Passport Essential SE 1TB


WB My Passport Essential SE 2.5 Inch is a simple plug and play portable external hard drive with 1TB storage capacity. It supports USB 3.0 interface which is 3 times faster than USB 2.0, thereby ensuring super speed. It features automatic and continuous backup of your files and password protection and encryption for the security of data. It is compatible with Windows and Mac OS and requires no external power supply. The Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1TB portable hard disk drive gives competition a very good run for money. With USB 3.0 support out-of-the-box, the strategy of Western Digital cannot be faulted. Granted, not too many existing desktops/laptops support this faster USB interface, but most current-generation PCs and new laptops do come with this feature, so it is a good thing.

Specification :

  • Brand : WD
  • Capacity : 1 TB
  • Connectivity : USB 3.0
  • Dimensions : 110 x 83 x 18 mm
  • Form Factor : Portable
  • Model : WDBACX0010BBL
  • OS Supported : Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2000, Mac OS X v10.5
  • External Power Required : No
  • Size : 2.5 inch
  • Transfer Speed : 5 Gb/s (USB 3.0), 480 Mb/s (USB 2.0)
  • Warranty : 3 years
  • Weight : 200 g
  • Retail Price : Rs 6,500/- (Including Tax)
Review : 

For the My Passport Essential SE, Western Digital bypassed the standard SATA II circuitry and built a USB connection directly into the 2.5 inch internal hard drive, making it shorter than other external hard drives. Unfortunately, the company chose to integrate a micro-USB connection instead of the more common mini-USB port found on external hard drives and digital cameras. While the connection is supposed to be more durable, the cable is also harder to replace if lost.

The My Passport Essential SE has four 250GB platters, making the drive slightly fatter than its 320GB and 500GB counterparts. However, it's still extremely portable and light. It incorporates 256-bit AES hardware encryption, but lacks any form of password recovery. The average read speed is 74.4Mb/s and the average write speed is 56.6Mb/s.

Features :

The main feature of the drive apart from it being a USB 3.0 drive lies in its utility – WD SmartWare. The drive comes bundled with this utility and it allows you to password protect your data and backup important files. On installation of the software, it will scan your system and segregate the data into System, Pictures, Music, Movies, Documents and Others. You get to see this is a graphical manner with each category represented by a colour code. Later you can backup entire categories or pick and choose folders, the next time you connect your drive and Run Backup. 

You can choose from colours such as black, red, blue, silver based on your preferences.


Design :

The WD My Passport Essential SE drive looks identical to any other My Passport series of drives. The 2.5-inch drive is housed within a glossy black plastic cover. There is only one USB 3.0 interface port on the drive. The plastic covering does bend if pressed hard onto. There is a single status indicator that glows white when the drive is on.

Performance :

The drive gives unformatted space of 931.48 GB. It gave a Read Burst speed of 142.9 MB/s which was slower than that of Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex which gives 184 MB/s. In the real world testing which involved transferring 4GB sequential and assorted files from the WD drive to the RAID array and back we got the following scores. Read / Write (sequential file) in MB/s – 78.11 / 52.23 and Read / Write (Assorted) in MB/s – 78.22 / 71.96. This performance was slower than the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1.5TB drive which scored higher in the sequential file transfer tests. It took 43.12 secs to open a 1 GB PSD file when used as a scratch disk.

Conclusion :

Western Digital includes some excellent utilities with its My Passport Essential external hard drive. When compared to other portable external hard drives, the Western Digital My Passport SE seems a little sluggish when writing small files. However, that is still only a relative term since the speed of all external hard drives that connect to the PC over USB 2.0 are limited by the port itself. The Seagate GoFlex 1TB Portable uses a 5400rpm hard drive while My Passport Essential SE has 5200rpm as result, it give poor transfer times of data than other portable drives.


Pricing details of other capacities of WD Portable Harddisk :

  • My Passport Essential 500 GB - Rs 4,400/-
  • My Passport Essential SE 750 GB -  Rs 5,500/-
  • My Passport Essential SE 750 1 TB -  Rs 6,500/-
  • My Book Essential  1 TB – R. 5,000/-
  • My Book Essential  2 TB – Rs 7,500/-
  • My Book Essential  3 TB – Rs 11,000/-

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