My Passport 2TB questions

Hi, and thanks for any help in advance.  

I have a lot of music, photos and other document files on my Windows XP computer and up until now I have always stored the majority of them on two LaCie external hard drives as my main C drive only has about a 140GB capacity.  Nowhere near what I now need for my music collection alone.  So this week after a lot of deliberating I took the plunge and bought 3 much smaller My Passport 2TB drives.  I am intending to use these on my Windows PC and also on a MacBook Pro which has already been set up with a program that enables it to read a Windows External Drive.  Can’t remember if this was VM Firmware or something similar.  Anyway I digress.  

Because I now have these drives, I was hoping to back up some of the external HDs with other external drives connected together via the same computer, because of the high capacity, and now reading the literature it seems I cannot do this automatically…is this correct?  I have to copy and paste all the files over for safekeeping?  It seems all of my files have to be on the internal C drive somewhere is that right?  This is not the case with my multiple files so I’m guessing I have to do this now the more labour intensive and less up to date way?

Also I have some more questions.  If this is the case then there is no point in installing the WD SmartWare I take it?  If I don’t do I have to instal this other driver I see mentioned, SES is it?  And if I do things this way can I then use this drive on both the Mac and Windows?  Also if I do not instal WD SmartWare can I just eject the drive safely like you would using any drive on Windows or on the Mac or do I have to use this?

I am also not particularly keen on adding a password to my drives just in case it gets accidentally locked for good.  Do I have to set up a password first and then disable a password to be able to do this or can I just not install one in the first place.  The manual didn’t make that very clear.  

The other question I have is regarding the power to the drive.  I have a MacBook and didn’t realise at the time as I thought it would be far easier to run Windows and Mac with these drives if I bought the Windows version (as my other previous drives are also Windows versions), that I would need extra power to run them on the Mac.  Is this correct?

Final question.  If I don’t have to instal the WD Smartware or Security software, can I still install the Drive Utility Software to work alone.  

Thanks again.  :)

Yes you can copy and paste like with a normal USB memor, smartware wont allow you to backup from one hard drive to another, but you can try with a 3RD party program that allows you to do it. They require the same power on Windows and Macs. All of the software that came with the hard drive is optional to install.

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Thanks for your help.  That solves most of my problems at least :slight_smile:  Cheers!