WD - My Passport 2TB External USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive - Black

I have tried many external hard drive's in my day, all of which is use with my MacBook Pro. Of all the brands I have tried, Western Digital has consistently been my favorite. This hard drive is specifically formatted for Macs. The only reformatting necessary is if you need to partition it. For example, to create one for media files and one for a Time Machine back up. This can be can using the Disk Utility application. The drive needs to be erased, and at that point and you need to select the GUID partition map. Now you can partition the newly formatted drive into as many segments as you like. Western digital includes a few programs on the HD that so far I've found to be useful, with features like the ability to import files directly from cloud-based services such as Dropbox etc. I purchased this hard drive to replace the Seagate drive that I had been using for the last few months. But one day it died on me for no apparent reason. I highly recommend any Western Digital external HD, but if you're looking for something portable to use with your Mac, this is the one to get.

We buy external hard drives for one purpose and that is keeping a back up of our data. We usually don't move this item around. It is usually kept in a steady state in a drawer of a desk or similar. During this time, unlike a laptop or smart phone or tablet, which we are using every day and time, this drive is rarely used for making a new back up or copying some data from it. So compare to other electronic items, the usage of this item is much much lower. One would expect that this low usage would help the drive to live a healthy life for a longer time. Yet, the folks at WD still have found a way to keep this lifetime short and below 2 years. If you decide to buy this item, I recommend you buy a second drive and create 2 backups. Because this item is not reliable.

Purchased this HDD on a Sunday afternoon, transferred over 200 gigs worth of videos and pics from a laptop that was out of room, i was intending on upgrading the HDD in it. Monday, i continued to transfer, when i suddenly got an error telling me that the new WD Passport HDD was corrupt and unreadable. anyone who has gone through this can probably imagine how sick to my stomach, i instantly was. 6 years of my daughters basketball videos and picture now lost. Immediately to best buy to confirm that the HDD was definitely gone, The manager there and the geek squad agent was great help and had me get a hold of Western Digital first, HDD was only a day old and failed, WD would replace the HDD but offered no help whatsoever for recovering my Daughters history. I know that most people have had no issues with this brand, but I myself can never trust them again with my family photos and videos being secure again. Cant and wont take that chance ever again.

I installed a 2-TB back up drive the Western Digital Passport. About two weeks into using the drive, I received a signal that the drive was locked. I unlocked the drive and went about business. I hadn't had any error messages so I assumed everything was working properly. You know what they say about assume. There had been no backup since May 2 today is May 12. The software told me the Passport was off line. I removed the Passport from the USB 3.0 jack and let it idle for about 1-minute. I then plugged the unit into the USB port, heard all the bop and bips you expect too hear when connecting a USB device. Checked and the unit is still off line. It gets better. Click on WD Utilities or WD Security and when these programs open they both prompt me to "attach a supported WD Drive". Stick a fork in me - i'm done this WD 2-TB Passport is going back too Best Buy.

I was trying to study which external hard drive was the best option for my MacBook pro. I came down to this and a Seagate product. After looking at the specs and reviews, I found that the Seagate was most often used as a PS4 hard drive replacement and it often would crash on people using it for the personal computers. Seeing this, I steered away from Seagate and picked this product. The first thing you should know as a Mac owner, is that you do have to format it during the first use. It was extremely easy though, and really all you have to do is click a couple buttons and its done. I was a little worried about that before I bought it, but those worries were not necessary. The product is small enough to carry in a computer bag or keep on your desk without it getting in the way. Im very happy with the choice I made and would recommend it to anyone.

Bought this backup drive on sale to replace a WD drive that failed after 6 years. It backs up everything except a password protected Word document and some jpeg files that are really documents - surprising and disappointing because the old one had no problem backing up everything until it failed. Also, the drive apparently did not download the utilities software very well. I cannot open the drive from the desktop. I have to access the drive itself to set up the backup schedule. When I try to do this from the desktop, I get a notice that says I should attach a drive. Very disappointing for a WD product. I'll have to use Geek Squad services to fix this. I hesitatingly recommend this product if you are downloading it for the first time.

I wanted at 2TB hdd for my macbook pro, but they didn't have the mac formatted ones available so I thought I'd grab this one (which was $10 cheaper), but formatted for the PC. I simply formatted for the mac (was very quick) and boom...it's now a mac harddrive. It works great. The startup and transfer speeds seem to be fast (I don't have any sort of tools to measure), but transferring videos has been VERY quick. This is my second Western Digital portable HDD (still use the other one for the pc) and this performs just as great as the only one. The only downside is making sure you don't lose the cable that comes with it. Cause if you do, good luck with having no usb3.0. Other than that....go for it!

At this point in the game all drives are pretty much standard you've got some really good ones some really slow ones you've got the ultra-fast ones and then you've got some that have problems... I've bought this drive before and it's worked just fine but with this particular one something is glitching in the video that I put on it so I need to reformat it again hopefully that will solve the problem and of course it's past the two-week return date so all I can do now is reformat the dang thing like I said I bought other drives just like this and they've all worked fine this one has a glitch so I'll let you know if I get the glitch fixed[ if I can edit this review in the future?], no problems on all the other portable drives I've bought though...