Western Digital My Passport Elite 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAC5000ACH-NESN (Charcoal) Buy Now

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 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAC5000ACH-NESN (Charcoal).

Seagate FreeAgent Desk for Mac 1.5 TB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/800 Desktop External Hard Drive ST315005FJA105-RK (Silver) Order Now

I use this hanging off a USB hub on my AiportExtreme. I set it up for both PC (XP) and Mac access. One partion is used for TimeMachine backups for my iMac, which is wirelessly connected. It powers up for the backups and then sleeps when done. Was super easy to setup and partition. Have also connected it directly to the iMac using Firewire 800, when I needed to restore, after my system started misbehaving (bad sectors on the internal drive, I think). It really saved my day having the external backup, which was super easy to restore.

The drive is super quite, and looks great. I have had it since July 2009 with no issues.Get more detail about Seagate FreeAgent Desk for Mac 1.5 TB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/800 Desktop External Hard Drive ST315005FJA105-RK (Silver).

Synology DiskStation 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage DS209 (White) Decide Now

I received this few days ago, have tested for several different options/funtions, and am uplaoding my files finally. As I mentioned,I understand why people like this machine among various NASes. Actually, I bought a different NAS and should return it because lacks of basic functions(they are saying it is easy to use right out of the box). But I don't want to sacrifice whatever functions I expect for NAS. This machine give me even more than expectations such as DS photo and audio through Iphone. My concept is that I want use one hdd(WD1001FALS)as actual drive and other hdd(WD1001FALS) as backup, not using RAID 1. I set up that way, using local backup and 3 times/week scheduling. this way allowes me to recover files from backup if I accidently delete something/mess up. there is no way to slavage files with RAID1(simultaneous copy/delete/sync). It is relatively quiet, very intuitive setup and fast file transfer. I used 2 WD1001FALS and D-Link 655 and 2208 routers without any problems such as hibernation and port forwarding issues. If you are looking for NAS and expecting some sophisticated functions. This is it. I am very happy with it.Get more detail about Synology DiskStation 2-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage DS209 (White).