This is a great little drive! It quickly and easily added 500GB to my MacBook Air once I made some modifications to Western Digital's setup process. The drive powers itself on a single USB port, unlike some other drives that need two. The drive is totally silent, no vibration, and the included dock is decent but the glossy finish looks odd with the matte finish on the drive itself.
The area WD needs to improve is in SOFTWARE. Every single time you plug this drive in, it mounts a virtual CD on the desktop. You can't turn it off with the drive software. To remove it, you literally have to drag the icon to the trash every single time (reformatting the drive doesn't work). It took me 10 mins on Google to find that WD has a utility to unmount it permanently for both Windows and Mac - it's buried within their site. Downloading this utility and running it FINALLY got rid of the CD icon on my desktop. Frustrating!
WD also provides backup software, but it just isn't anywhere as nice as Time Machine on the Mac or the backup solution for Windows 7. There are also drivers you can install to replace the stock icons on the desktop with WD icons showing how much of the drive is being used. These were the least invasive of WD's software, but added no real value to the drive.
That's 3 DIFFERENT pieces of software to configure. To use a USB hard drive. That's about 3 too many, for my tastes!
The status LEDs on the drive itself are a bit wonky too. There are four LEDs to indicate how much drive space has been taken up. One: They ONLY work if you install the WD software, otherwise they just stay dark. Two: Even when they're on, they make zero sense.
You might think with 4 LEDs that as you filled the drive up, they would light (and stay lit)... kind of like filling up a glass with water. The more in the glass, the more LEDs are lit. This is NOT the case. LED 1 is 0%-25%. LED 2 is 25%-50%. You see where this is going. Only a single LED stays lit, and from any more than 6 inches away you can see WHICH LED is lit: 1, 2, 3, or 4. Could have been a neat feature, but again, software killed it.
To make this drive useful and not frustrating I ended up removing ALL Western Digital software from my Mac, reformatting the drive with Disk Utility, giving up on use of the LEDs on the front, and letting Mac OS manage the backups and the drive itself.
Once you remove all trace of Western Digital software, you're left with a normal, small, quiet hard drive that works great for backups and storage, fits in my (small) laptop bag with little weight added, and looks nice!
The drive gets 5 STARS. The software gets 1 STAR.Get more detail about Western Digital My Passport Elite 640 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAC6400ACH-NESN (Charcoal).
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