So, to continue on the theme of sharing my wonderful tech Christmas presents with you, it is time to share one of my favorite gifts, the 500 GB Western Digital Passport Elite! As you can see in the picture above, I got the bronze color; which honestly wasn’t my first choice, but the vendor it was ordered from ran out of the titanium that I wanted and to avoid a shipping and refund disaster, I stuck with the bronze. It was okay because I ended up also getting a great silicon sleeve cover for the hard drive to give it extra support. I ordered seafoam, as you can see below, and although it looks bright blue, it is actually more of a tiffany blue/robins egg in person. Anyway, back to the hard drive! I cannot tell you how long it took me to decide on an external hard drive for my backup needs, but I knew what I was looking for and what my needs were and this drive is exactly what I wanted. Lets go through a bit of the features and see if this drive is something you might also need to fit your life if you are in the market for a portable external hard drive.
First of all, this drive is obviously portable. Very important to me, the portability factor, especially since I am a laptop user 100% of the time and require that all my accessories function in a “to go” manner. This is a very small drive, it can probably fit into most pockets. It is very lightweight and has a great shape like the rest of the Western Digital Passport series. One difference in the external appearance of this drive compared to other WD models is that the finish is soft to the touch and easy to grip- another plus for the portability. I feel like I can take this drive with me, throw it in a bag, and it can knock around without getting damaged. The soft touch almost seems like shock resistance, as well as resistance to scratches because the surface really can’t be damaged other than through cracking.
Next, this drive is a USB 2.0 only. So no fire wire, but that’s cool with me because I never use firewire with my Mac! The transfer rate is great and the drive has a handy dandy indicator light that marks capacity as well as establishes the presence of its connection to a computer. The indicator lights are located on the side of the drive on a sliding door that covers and reveals the mini USB port so that when the drive is not in use, it has a very flush finish. I like the addition of this sliding door because previous models of this drive used a soft plug to fill in the ports, something I always found to be cheap and easily broken!
Finally, this drive has some major storage capacity! 500 GB is more space than I might ever need, and that is why I bought such a large drive- I won’t have to buy another or replace it anytime soon! I already have an 80 GB WD Passport from a year or so ago that is now too small to fit everything on my laptop’s hard drive. I feel like it was such a waste and I didn’t want to have the same thing happen again if I bought a new hard drive or a new laptop in the next year. This way I cover all my bases! I have enough space to backup my laptop and enough space to keep extras on my hard drive. Right now, I have primarily been using it to store all the videos and pictures I take, instead of putting those files onto my laptop hard drive and taking up too much space. I also use this hard drive for video and image editing because it is recommended that laptop users not use their internal hard drives for such large and complicated tasks. I think this is in case of internal drive failure and it slows down the drive as well to process large files on your laptop’s hard drive.
So, overall, I am very very excited about this new drive of mine! It is everything I could ever need: portable, dependable and functional! I would very much recommend this drive to anyone looking for an external portable hard drive for their own similar interest and needs!