Western Digital My Passport Essential (500GB) review

The external hard disk market is so competitive that it's next to impossible to buy a bad drive – most of the drives on the market are very close in performance and price. But the extras you get with a drive are certainly not the same across the board, and the portable Western Digital My Passport is crammed with goodies.

The first time you plug in the My Passport Essential (as long as you have AutoPlay enabled) up pops Western Digital's new SmartWare Software. You have to install a copy of this on the host PC, which isn't ideal (we'd rather it ran directly from the disk itself), but once you do you get a host of options.

It lets you set up whole disk, 256-bit hardware encryption, and the application offers a simple route to backing up your important files. We particularly liked the backup preview mode, which scans your system for important files (pictures, video, documents and so on) and presents a simplified graphical view of how much disk space will be required to back it up.

Once you've set the backup off, however, you don't need to pay any attention to this view – the software simply monitors your PC for new files and backs them up on a continuous basis. All very neat and tidy.

Speed-wise, the My Passport Essential is perfectly acceptable too, reading small files at a rate of 11.3MB/sec and large files at 48.8MB/sec, and writing them at 21.3MB/sec and 34.2MB/sec with or without encryption enabled.

Less acceptable is the fact that, rather than using mini-USB to connect with, it uses the less common micro-USB interface. If you lose the cable that comes in the box, you're far less likely to have a replacement just hanging around. And neither are we fans of the glossy black finish, which picks up scuffs too easily for our liking.

Despite these little niggles, though, we like the My Passport Essential. It's perfectly quick and crams in an easy-to-use backup tool and full-disk 256-bit hardware encryption at a price (14p/GB) not much dearer than standard 500GB portable drives. That makes it a very good buy.

Author: Jonathan Bray