Customer Ratings & Reviews

This drive failed on day 2. I would like to return and get money back or a credit. Please help….

Very bad product i will never buy again it broke within 5 months of purchase

The Unit worked for 48 hours, was 50% filled and then died. what a waste of time.

Didn’t work - tried everything and Nothing — I’ll be returning it

A good source to store pictures, easy to setup and use.

I could only put 80GB on this disk, not sure what was going on. returning this thing,

No access after 1 week. I had to reformat the drive. It worked for about a week after that and now windows cannot access it.

This is a terrible product. My hard drive got corrupted and all files are lost. Don't make the mistake that i did!

This is slow and very hard to setup. I am disappointed in the device.

It did not work well with my Mini Mac desktop computer. I had to return it.

Still Isn’t working copied one file and can’t return because it is classified data

This product was working before but now not working no more can you please do me a favor to replace it

This HD died after only a month. Good thing I had this backup backed up elsewhere.

I have bad luck with external hard drives, but this thing broke down way too quick.

My external hard drive got messed up in less than a month. It was never dropped or anything.

Joke!!!!!!! Kept saying it was shut off wrong when all i did was turn off PS4

Windows did not recognize the device and I couldn't return it to Best Buy

The computer has stopped recognizing it after I copied all the data

Bought it 12/10 and it already quit. Wont buy another.

Backing up your computer is a little like brushing your teeth after eating lunch. Everyone knows it’s a good idea. Just about everyone has the means of doing it. And yet it’s just enough of an inconvenience that virtually no one does. The WD Passport series seeks to use a combination of cost-effective hardware and user friendly software to reduce that inconvenience to one that most people will be willing to improve their bad habits, and this one is no exception. As far as the hardware goes, it’s solid but doesn’t do much to really stand out regarding what you get. Inside the fairly rugged (and heavy) case is a standard 2.5” drive of the same sort you’d find in a laptop plugged into a USB 3.0 interface. I can’t see any evidence of additional shock or vibration protection being used to help combat the problems mechanical drives usually experience when being taken on the go, so a padded carrying case may not be a bad idea if you plan to use it like that. While they get marks for not requiring an external power brick and using a replaceable, non-proprietary cable they lose some ground here for using the Micro B connector to connect the drive rather than the more durable (and ubiquitous) USB-C connection standard. This is particularly annoying for a portable device, as finding one of these cables out in the wild is borderline impossible in most places, so if you lose it your only option will be to substitute a much slower (and less robust) standard micro USB cable in its place. Also, as is typical in these devices, while the interface may be fast the drive it’s connected to is not. Don’t get me wrong, speeds can be pretty good under the right conditions where the drive’s expanded cache can come into play, but at the end of the day you’ve still got a mechanical laptop drive in there. As such it’s probably not a device I’d recommend for uses where a high transfer speed is essential, such as a portable media vault. Fortunately, the unit fares a LOT better when it comes to software. Preloaded on the drive is a pair of install wrappers for Western Digital’s Discovery dashboard – one for Windows and one for Mac. Running them should, ideally, download the latest version of the utility from the internet and install it on your machine (though in my case I found I needed to go to Western Digital’s support website and download it from there before it would actually work.) This then lets you install 3 basic apps: one for backups, another for security management, and one for maintenance and health monitoring of the drive. The utilities aren’t likely to blow anyone away with their feature set, but they’re very simple to use and offer more than the barebones functionality you’ll get with a lot of manufacturers. Once each of these optional programs have been installed you’ll be walked through setting up the most basic features of each such as establishing a backup schedule, setting a password for the drive’s encryption (which is hardware based so as to remove a potential bottleneck created by software encryption utilities), and renaming the primary volume. There’s also an option for turning off the status LED for the drive – something that more backup devices could stand to implement given that usually the best time to pull a backup is at night when the computer’s not in use. There’s also an option to save backups to a cloud service such a Dropbox so you don’t have to worry about bringing the drive with you everywhere. Ultimately, the word I keep coming back to in my head when trying to describe this drive is “effective.” It’s not as rugged or fast as an SSD. It’s not as feature rich or sophisticated as a desktop RAID array or small scale NAS appliance. And it’s not as automatic as a cloud backup service that’s constantly running in the background. But it is inexpensive, easy to use, and big enough to take just about anything you might throw at it. And for most people, that should be enough to meet their needs.