Wd passport ultra vs. essential
Minimalist design touches are carefully thought out, color choices are downright eye-popping (and in a few cases, downright scary), and the enclosure’s slim profile and light weight give it an incredible ratio of portability to capacity in the 320 GB configuration, especially.īesides the matte finish, what you don’t get on the Passport Essential is the Elite’s sliding port cover.
Wd passport ultra vs. essential portable#
I can’t imagine that this kind of concern will cause too much consternation for too many users, however.Įven without the Elite’s understated, high-dollar look, the fun loving Essential still carries over the basic design ideas that have long made WD Passport drives a favorite around here for portable storage. While the Essential’s high-gloss plastic affords potential buyers a wider range of color options (there are 11 choices currently available) than the matte-finish Elite model, the step-down drive is particularly prone to showing off fingerprints, smudges, and scratches. Four small rubber feet help the drive sit securely on angled desktops. The Essential’s plastic shell is thickly built with tight seams and minimal flex.
Wd passport ultra vs. essential software#
For $15 more, the Iomega eGo offers better speeds, and is rated to survive 7-foot drops, and if you're looking to save some money, the $99 Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex couples a sweet set of software with better performance.The Passport Essential is built to the same size, weight, and basic footprint as its pricier sibling.
That said, its poor transfer times and flimsy case make the $109 asking price hard to stomach. Western Digital includes some excellent utilities with its My Passport Essential external hard drive. That's good enough to beat out the LaCie Rikiki (36.6 MBps) and the Buffalo MiniStation (44.5 MBps), but it's still far below the Seagate GoFlex (71.1 MBps). When copying the same 5GB folder off the My Passport Essential, the drive fared a little better, taking 1 minute and 50 seconds, a rate of 46.5 MBps. The fastest drive, the Buffalo MiniStation Stealth, wrote the files at a rate of 64 MBps-23 seconds faster. It took the My Passport Essential 1 minute 43 seconds to transfer a 5GB folder of documents and media files, a rate of 49.7 MBps, the slowest of the 1TB drives we tested. Unfortunately, all the software in the world can't make up for slow transfer speeds. Buffalo Technology includes more advanced software with its drive, but Western Digital comes in a close second. And, as a bonus, all the apps are bundled together so the software is easier to uninstall. There's even a way to check drive diagnostics and set a timer as low as 10 minutes for when the drive goes to sleep. Western Digital also includes encryption software to protect the drive and password-protect files.
You can quickly select whether to restore files to their original location or to a new folder. Restoring files was also just as easy using the Western Digital software.
As the backup finishes documents or media files, you see a box that fills up. During backup, the software provides a visual indicator of the status by way of gauges.