Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAA5000ABK-NESN. Customer review

My experience with Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB was a nightmare to be frank. Just a couple of days after I bought Passport Essential, I returned it to the retail store and I am going to describe my unpleasant experience for those few days I owned.

First day I installed Passport Essential like any ordinary USB external hard drive by simply plugging it in and the driver worked normally as expected. The most annoying problem that presented itself the first time was with the Smart Ware on Virtual CD. Here is what happens, whenever the drive is plugged in a Virtual CD appears and then the Smart Ware installer will auto run itself as if a CD was inserted (impossible! That is exactly what happens). Unfortunately, there is absolutely no means to get rid of this annoying feature from the Passport Essential 500 hard drive. I do not know why Western Digital they did not make this software removable like many other most portable hard drives that have free software and you may uninstall it if you do not require it.

It has come to my understanding why Passport Essential might have thought it fit to do it this way. The hardware encryption feature when used locks the entire hard drive so this will require you to keep the software to unlock it somewhere else. If you use the portable drive on another computer, the Virtual CD will install Western Digital Smart Ware and then you must enter the required password to obtain access to the entire portable drive.

. The necessity of the encryption feature is actually for safety and complete privacy. This feature on the Passport Essential will lock the entire portable hard drive to ensure that it is only usable with a password and on a computer that has Smart Ware software installed. Therefore, if you are transferring files to another computer you will need to install Smart Ware software and have the password to unlock the portable drive.

You need to be aware that Passport Essential Smart Ware feature can run on some systems but computers running Linux are not compatible with the software. Finally, Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAA5000ABK-NESN is definitely the ideal item if you want to store sensitive material, but in my case, I do a lot of file transfer and therefore it is not convenient for me.