
I recieved the WD Passport Essential 400gb drive as a Christmas gift. I had done a lot of research and found most reviews complain about the software, WDSync. The directions are a joke, it has three steps that tell nothing about how to use the drive after plugging the thing into the USB port. I found and started the software with no issues, but I quickly found that it was not very intuitive.
I had to create a user profile, cool I thought. Then I sync'd my stuff to the drive. I opened Win Explorer to see my files, and because it encrypted it, all the files are unrecongnizable and useless. Useless that is until you send it back to the PC, a function in the WDSync software that I was unable to figure out how to use. There is no option to put files on the drive without encrypting them.
I tried to sync a specific file to the drive. It does not have the ability to sync specific files, you have to select folders. So I selected everything in my Win Vista user profile and sync'd it to the drive. It tood 45 minutes to sync 40gb through a USB 2 connection. Very slow I thought. I then made a change to one file that had been sync'd, and selected just the folder that this file was in and sync'd it. It erased everything I had put on the drive from my user profile, and put just the files in the folder that I selected this last time. So it seems that it will make the drive the same as only what you are synching at any one time. Anthing that is on the drive will be erased, and copied over by the new data. So that means that if I want all the stuff on my Win Vista profile backed up by this drive, I have to sync the whole profile every time. Well I already found that that is 40gb and takes the better part of an hour to do! That's no good.
Now here's the kicker. Every time you plug this drive in and start the WDSync software, it syncs the drive whether you want it to or not. That means, every time I turn on my computer, plug this drive in and start WDSync to back up a few files that I've added or changed, it takes almost an hour to do this and I have no control over it.
Sooooo.....I went looking for better software. I found Allway Sync. This does what I want it to do, it's untuitive, and it just works the way we all think that it should. You can sync a single file or a folder, It does not use encryption, so it's very fast, about twice as fast as WDSync while moving the same data. When it does a sync, it only overwrites the files that it is told to sync. If there is not a change in the file's date stamp compared to the file on your PC, it makes no changes to it.
Over all, I like the drive. It's small, with big capacity. It does not get very warm at all, is quiet, and works very well. I accidentally deleted everything that came on the drive (thanks to WDSync), so now I only have the folders of the PC's that I backed up, and the .exe file for Allway Sync. I would recommend deleting everything off of this drive as soon as you get it, then download Allway Sync to the drive and use that. The drive is great, but Western Digital has totally blown it with it's crappy software though.Get more detail about
Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDME5000TN (Midnight Black).