My Passport feedback from a 'Road Warrior"

I spend a considerable amount of time in airports, rental cars and hotels and wanted to post my experience with your My Passport drives.  I currently use the 1Tb (WDBY8L00208SL-01) drive the most.

Observations:

  1. The casing is bulky - with a 2.5" drive only being 8-10mm thick, why is the casing so thick?  I can feel at least 1mm of space between the casing and drive if I squeeze it gently.  Surely there’s some space to be gained?  Every mm is precious when you’re relying on packing things into bags to travel.

  2. Ruggedness - the overall package seems pretty rugged, and well able to withstand the abuse of being carted about daily and pulled in and out of bag pockets, etc.  with one exception below:

  3. The rubber stick-on feed are useless.  Within days they had peeled off, never to be seen again. Either forget them altogether, or use some better way of providing a scratch-free standing area.

  4. The connector - What a pain!  I managed to get one squashed in an overloaded bag and found that they bend easily, are completely propriety, are not available as a spare, and forced me to buy a completely new drive, just to get a cable to access my data.  Please scrap the proprietary cable connector and use min/micro-USB like everyone else!

  5. The cable -  Could it be hardwired, or somehow a cable retention be included in the casing so it is protected in stowage and not broken as easily?

  6. Speed and compatibility - used on laptops, PCs and an MS Surface, compatibility fine and speed (especially connected via USB 3) very good.

  7. Included software - Haven’t used the backup software, as that’s not why I’m using it.  I’ve only just discovered the WD Media Player and it is quite nice and simple. Overall pleased, although perhaps an autostarting interface/web page would be nice initially (with the ability to turn it off once you were familiar with the product).

  8. LED - Both power and disk access LED’s would be nice - with the ability to turn the brightness down as the present blue LED really does light up a Hotel room at night!

Overall, a nice product.  A little bulky, and an infuriating cable, but worth the money.

nglshmn wrote:

  1. The connector - What a pain!  I managed to get one squashed in an overloaded bag and found that they bend easily, are completely propriety, are not available as a spare, and forced me to buy a completely new drive, just to get a cable to access my data.  Please scrap the proprietary cable connector and use min/micro-USB like everyone else!

 

You got this wrong, that’s a standard USB 3.0 micro connector. It’s not WD, and you can even fit regular USB 2.0 micro cables into the flat side (Not the joint square side) of the connector as well to force USB 2.0 mode.