Home > Consumer Reviews > Western Digital My Passport Essential 160 GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive WDMEPN1600TN (Vibrant Pink)

Nice little drive. No set-up required. I would give it a 5 out of 5 BUT. . . WD bills it as Mac OS compatible. Strictly speaking, this is true. What they don't tell you and you don't find out until you're trying to back up your files is that this drive has the same restrictive naming conventions as PCs. The result is that unless you restrict your name length and don't use characters such as dash or backslash when labeling your files, the process stalls out and you have to rename each file individually. It's a serious PIA. I would recommend that anyone using Mac look elsewhere.

I purchased Western Digital My Passport Essential 320 GB USB 2 Portable Hard Drive and when i tried to register at western digital website with the serial number it started saying me Out of Region Warranty. This means that the item with the serial number was meant for use in European/Asian countries and the warranty was not valid.

When i called WD customer service they asked me to send the proof of purchase and changed the region in their records so that the 3 year warranty is valid in US also.

So before you destroying your purchase proof, make sure you register with WD website. Not sure how could Amazon ship such items which are meant for sale in non-US country.

My ***major warning*** for this product is that some older computers don't have enough power in their USB drives to use it (even with USB 2.0). The drive seems to work fine on a newer Mac Powerbook, but is not recognized at all by my older Powerbook G4. It just makes a strange clicking sound as long as I have it plugged in.

Not enough power through the USB port is what I have been reading on various troubleshooting websites. There are some "work arounds" (special cables, &c.) but I don't really want to deal with any of that. I also read that this is a general problem for USB hard drives, so this is not really a specific problem with this model (hence I still give 3 stars).

So I would recommend getting a drive that runs off of Firewire if you want to be more sure that it will work with your computer. I wish I had.

This was just purchased a few days ago, and so far it's been a tremendous addition for a PC hard drive that was crowded with media files. In minutes, I was able to transfer more than 40GB of files to this WD external drive (and still have 270GB+ of space left to use). Accessing the files for various reasons is as easy as when they were on the main drive. The very compact design plugs into a rear USB and sits atop the tower, making no sounds and creating very little heat. It spins down when not in use and is ready to go when I bring the PC out of standby every day. Definitely worth having if you store image, music or video files on your PC. Freeing up your hard drive will do wonders for the computer's performance. Recommended

I will be brief.
The good part - compact, sleek, very portable and quite easy to work with.

The bad part - VERY VERY VERY primitive software that overwrites your sensitive data without warning leading to loss of important files in a way that they can't be recovered!!
If you are trying to synchronize your computer and the drive, and if you have created new files on computer that now should be copied over to the drive, Passport software starts overwriting files on your computer!!! I lost several GBs of sensitive emails, almost an years worth of communication that was extremely important. My coworkers started reporting similar experience and collectively we decided our corporate cannot afford the sloppy Passport software.
Final Take: Buy at your own risk