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Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB WDBABM0010BBK-NESN

My line of work requires that I have a lot of disk space to hold my data. I’m not talking about 20GB of software or files, but rather 450-600GB vmdk virtual disks used to keep a snapshot of our client VMWare environments; so over the last 2 years, I accumulated over 15 USB external drives that averaged 500GB in size. I required the external USB powered drives because I travel a lot and often run these images when I’m on battery power. I’ve run out of space so badly that my laptop lid is covered with Velcro so that most of these drives can stay affixed to my work environment….. You bet I received tons of grief from my coworkers, especially considering I work at EMC2, which manufactures huge Storage Arrays that go in Data Centers. I just couldn’t figure out a way to get one of those velcro’d to my laptop lid, otherwise I’d be set!

So, that covers “why” I need these drives, and what my main requirements are: USB Powered, Largest on the market to consolidate smaller ones, and as small as possible as it relates to physical space it takes up in my laptop bag.

These drives are the largest on the market that are self-powered from a single USB port, which is why these are a good candidate for my needs. While I realize everyone is frustrated with the USB cord being a micro USB rather than a traditional 5 pin USB that is commonly used on today’s digital cameras to sync, for me that was not a big deal at all. My Plantronics Bluetooth headset uses the Micro USB, as does my Griffin iPhone charging pack, so I was no stranger to Micro USBs. These drives allowed me to go from 12-15 500GB drives down to 5 of these 1TB drives, with the excess 1TB that makes up the difference between all my old 500GB drives and the new 1TB drives being duplicate files across the smaller drives that were identified once I was able to run Deduplication software over the holidays this year.
Now that I’ve had these drives for a little over a month, I can tell you what I don’t like about them, so that you can make up your own mind as to the importance that they have on your overall requirements from a drive. First off, everyone griped about the software auto starting when they plugged it in, but I always avoid double clicking on the drive letter in Windows Explorer and prefer to right click and either choose “Explore” or “Open File Location”. That allows me to view the folder structure before I format the drive to the File System of my choice.

A word of caution on these drives, which someone else mentioned as well, and that is the drivers for it do NOT auto install FROM the new drive OR from Windows itself. It is not recognized and you will start to get messages saying the drive can run faster under USB 2.0, which is happening because you need to manually go into device manager, right click on the device named “WD SES Device” that is identified as missing its drivers, and select update drivers. Now for the tricky part. You then need to choose to go find the file by browsing your PC for drivers, and these new drivers are located in the CD ROM drive mapping that was added to your PC when you plugged this new drive into your USB port. It will have a CD icon under Removable Storage, be named “WD SmartWare”, and have UDF underneath the Smartware word. You will need to dig a bit to find the inf for the drive, so here is the path that it’s mapped to on my laptop, and all you’ll have to do is change my E Drive with whatever yours is mapped to (E:\Extras\WD SES Device Driver). This should get you squared away, but REMEMBER TO COPY THIS FOLDER OFF TO ANOTHER PC OR DRIVE BECAUSE ONCE YOU FORMAT THE DRIVE, THIS GOES AWAY, AND SO DOES YOUR ABILITY TO EASILY FIND THE DRIVERS. I DOWNLOADED A DRIVER FROM THE WD SITE THAT WAS NEWER THAN THIS ONE, AND IT PLAGUED MY LAPTOP PERFORMANCE, SO I HAVE STUCK WITH THE ORIGINAL RTM DRIVERS.

Another word of caution is the opening in the drive itself where the micro usb cable plugs into on the drive is ridiculously fragile. A month in and after almost filling one of these TB drives up, the light stopped flashing on the side, I no longer heard the drive power on and start spinning, nor was it being recognized by my laptop. I about crapped myself because I’ve already been thru hell a year ago when I lost 1.5TB of client data that I had sitting on a Seagate 1.5TB 3.5″ SATA hard drive which had a flaw in its firmware where it would wipe your existing partitions clean off the drive AND write 0′s in the place of the data that used to reside on the drive and then corrupted the firmware itself IF AND ONLY IF you happened to connect that Seagate drive to a Dell PC that also had a conflict with it. So, all in all, I was pretty frustrated thinking I had lost another drive. But, there was another option. I talked to WD and they said they’d replace the drive for me, but I was obviously more concerned with the data on it. The drive was cheap enough to replace if it ever came to that. So WD sent me a new drive, and in the meantime, I took this drive apart to see if I could fix it myself or at least identify what happened to make it become a paper weight. Once I got the drive opened, it was quite interesting. These are not 2.5″ SATA drives like all the other usb powered drives….. It’s a 2.5 or maybe even a 2.75″ drive, but you can’t take it out of the plastic case it’s in and say slide it into your laptop, which is what I tried to do the first day I got these drives, so this was actually my second time under the hood of the drive cases.

Now, there was something I was very stoked about which was the fact that these drives use a very similar circuitry design that their larger cousin uses in the 3.5″ SATA drive in that you can unscrew about 6-8 hex screws and take off the green circuit board that physically connects the SATA pins to the hard drive itself. This is done intentionally as opposed to permanently affixing the SATA connector to the drive, because if the SATA pins break off, which I’ve seen happen numerous times before, the drive is dead and so is the data on it. With the board having the ability to be exchanged out, one for one, the drive powers up instantly. So in my case with this 1TB USB drive, the female connector was somehow damaged by the useless cables they provided because they kept falling out at an angle and must have bent one of the 5 pins that are required to power this drive. So on these drives, instead of the green circuit board having a SATA connector on it like 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA drives use, this drive has the female end of the micro USB connection. What I did was take off the board that had the bad female connector and replaced it with the board from the new 1TB drive that arrived from WD. Once I did that, the drive powered up and hasn’t had a hiccup since, which was over a week ago. If you ever get into trouble with something like this on these drives, don’t be so quick to give up because there is usually an option available, but it was a bummer I had to even deal with this in the first place.

Lastly, and probably the most important comment I wanted to make was how absolutely flimsy the micro usb cords are that were provided with the drives, and how I’ve already had to return one of the 5 because the cord kept coming out while I was using the drive running VMs, and it eventually corrupted my data because of the constant on off on off on off on off on all day long. However, I am very pleased to say that I have found a total workaround for this and no longer have a problem with the cord falling out. I invested in new micro USB cords from Monster, link below, and they fit very tightly, have never come out, and I have seen a huge improvement in IO performance from these drives, which is an even bigger win. I know some of you will feel that for the price of the drive, working cables should be expected. And I agree, but they aren’t practical, and it was worth the investment of $15-$20 per cable to ensure I didn’t have to go through losing another drive. I actually feel these drives are a complete steal for being the only 1TB usb powered drive on the market, though, and have no regrets with them even after having to get new cables for them.

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I know this is quite long, and I really only planned to add feedback regarding the USB cords, but once I started typing, I figured I’d help someone out who will undoubtedly run into the same situation I did but get through it without the stress and headaches! If you need pictures of what the inside looks like, email me and I can get them to you.

Reviewed by : Jason J. Volpe,  Jan 9, 2010