Western Digital My Passport Essential SE (1TB) external hard drive

Western Digital delivers 1TB of storage and good security in a portable package

PC World Australia (online)

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Western Digital’s My Passport Essential SE is currently the only portable external hard drive to boast a whopping 1TB of storage space. Despite this, it is one of the smallest hard drives around and it is quite speedy, too.

  • Expert Rating

    4.25 / 5

  • User Rating

    1.50 / 5 (of 3 Reviews)

Pros

  • Tiny, 256-bit hardware encryption, simple to configure and use

Cons

  • Sluggish write speeds, backup software limitations

Bottom Line

The My Passport Essential SE is Western Digital's largest capacity portable hard drive yet, and it offers encryption to keep your data secure.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 379.00 (AUD)

Special Offers

For the My Passport Essential SE, Western Digital bypassed the standard SATA II circuitry and built a USB connection directly into the 2.5in 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. It's still extremely portable and light, however.

The My Passport Essential SE incorporates 256-bit AES hardware encryption, but lacks any form of password recovery.

WD SmartWare

WD's SmartWare software.

The bundled WD SmartWare software automatically launches the first time the My Passport Essential SE is connected, and categorises data on both your PC and the drive based on file extensions. From here, you can choose which types of files to back up. However, unlike the HP SimpleSave Portable external hard drive, the My Passport Essential SE does not allow you to set your own custom extensions. This means obscure media formats, for example, will simply be listed as "other". WD SmartWare supports sequential backups for up to 25 versions of the same file.

Small File (3GB) Transfer Test Results
Model Price Storage Capacity Read
speed (MBps)		 Write
speed (MBps)		 Read/write
speed (MBps)
Western Digital My Passport Essential SE $379 1TB 26.7 11.7 7.6
LaCie Starck Mobile Hard Drive $139 320GB 24.5 17.1 11.1
Astone ISO GEAR 290 $149 500GB 20.5 13.5 9.7
HP SimpleSave Portable $139 320GB 20.4 12.6 8.2
Transcend StoreJet 25M-R $159.95 320GB 23.8 15.3 7.2
Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II $999 4TB 23.4 15 10.7

Large File (20GB) Transfer Test Results
Model Price Storage Capacity Read
speed (MBps)		 Write
speed (MBps)		 Read/write
speed (MBps)
Western Digital My Passport Essential SE $379 1TB 31.4 24.8 11.2
LaCie Starck Mobile Hard Drive $139 320GB 27.4 25.9 12.7
Astone ISO GEAR 290 $149 500GB 28.7 25.2 11.5
HP SimpleSave Portable $139 320GB 27.9 25.1 11.6
Transcend StoreJet 25M-R $159.95 320GB 28.5 24.3 11.9
Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II $999 4TB 26.7 25.1 12.7

When compared to other portable external hard drives, the Western Digital My Passport SE seems a little sluggish when writing small files. However, it offers very fast read speeds with both big and small files.

The huge storage capacity, strong security, and ease of use make the Western Digital My Passport Essential SE external hard drive a great choice for those who need to take their work with them.

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Read more on these topics: storage, hard drives, encryption, western digital

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Steve

4.0

1

Pros
Fast reads. Cheap
Cons
WD software.
• • •

WD backup software. It can't be wiped. I always nuke it as soon as it stats running when you connect the drive

James Wright

0.0

2

Pros
this drive is lousy
Cons
nothing about this drive
• • •

I bought three unfortunately for my wife, myself and my daughter.

I have been using computers since the first Radio Shack TRS80 came out 30 years ago. I am no novice

The drive is terrible, you plug it in and there is no way to force it to do an immediate backup. It just sits there. You might come back in an hour and it might be backing up files and it might not be. There is no way for the user to influence what it does and when it does it. It is useless unless you plan to have you computer plugged into it all the time which is impractical since I travel and have a laptop. The drive does what it wants when it wants to but most of the time it sits there doing nothing and you have to wait until it decides to turn itself on and starting transferring files from your hard drive to it. It is the worst peice of hardware I have ever bought. Unfortunately I bought three.

Arokh04

0.5

3

Pros
not this drive
Cons
this drive
• • •

This drive sucks.. this is my second one (replaced under warranty) that intermittently fails to spin up. WTF.

See all 3 user reviews   |   Write an user review

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