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Western Digital Elements SE Portable WDBPCK5000ABK 500 GB
by katyboo123
I got an Advent Laptop when I was 24 for my birthday off my super generous Step Dad. I had it for 4 years when at Christmas this year it overheated, switched off and left a lingering smell like an exploded hairdryer (you know that smell, right?). I had insurance through PC World and when I took it in to see them, they advised me that I ... had a free back up service as part of my package and if I brought in an external memory device, they could back up all of my information - which included about 3000 photos, so I thought about it for half a second, then went and bought the cheapest external hard drive they had for sale. They actually even gave me £10 off, so I paid just £55 (it's now only £50 full price!) for the Western Digital Elements SE Portable WDBPCK5000ABK 500 GB External Portable Hard Drive. They backed up my data and ultimately replaced my laptop with a newer model as mine was quite old, so all in all, thumbs up to PC World - but back to the review in hand!
My (now not so new) hard drive looks smart - it's black matte on the top and bottom and glossy black around the edges, it's a relatively small size, 11cm x 8cm and just under 2cm deep. It's got smart rounded corners and is lightweight - at just 0.2kg; it's perfect to carry around making it super portable. There are some really nice protective cases you can buy from PC World for just £4.99 too, though I am sure that you can pick them up cheaper online now. For a non gadget orientated person this is completely sufficient for me - though I have seen much smarter looking hard drives with price tags to match. That said; I have also seen some where they need wall plug power to work and are the size of a DVD player! It's robust and has shock absorbing technology which means you can take it wherever you go without worrying too much about your precious data being lost; perfect peace of mind!
Have you heard of a terabyte (TB)? Well I hadn't, but its 1,000 gigabytes (GB) for those who are as technically ignorant as me - for those who don't know a gigabyte or what the heck I am talking about, it's measures of data storage and transfer - just like ounces and pounds, grams and kilograms. So this hard drive is 'half a terabyte' in size, or 500GB. This is roughly enough for any 'average PC user' who wants to store documents, movies, games and photographs or who wants to copy and take back ups of a regular laptop or desktop. Currently I have a few thousand photographs, 3 years worth of University work (including PDF learning material as it was Distance Learning), hundreds of draft blog posts, downloaded recipes, e-books and about 100 albums and I've only used less than 10% of the drives capacity. Essentially, the cost per gigabyte of storage is just 10p. For online cloud storage you can't get even get that sort of deal!
The Western Digital Elements SE Portable WDBPCK5000ABK 500 GB External Portable Hard Drive has USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 meaning high speed data transfer, at up to 5 gigabytes per second. I have pictures taken with my DSLR camera which are very fine and large in size and they take fractions of a second to transfer to the hard drive, so it's quick. If you don't have a USB 3.0 port on your PC then you can enjoy reasonably fast speeds of 480 megabytes per second, which doubles the transfer time compared to USB 3.0 but again would be sufficient for an average user.
Overall this external hard drive is excellent value for money - a lot of storage for not a lot of coin. The transfer speeds are fast; it's reliable, robust and looks good plus it is super portable so you can take it anywhere without lugging power cables, etc around with you. I've had this for 9 months now and I use it very regularly, I rate it excellent for an average PC user and I would certainly recommend it!
It is available online and in PC World stores.
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Western Digital My Passport Essential SE WDBACX7500ARD 750 GB
by msannabella
I purchased this hard drive to store my music collection when it got too large for my computer. I looked into several and ended up with this one for several reasons. Western Digital is a reliable name can be relied on to provide a quality product. The size of this hard drive is good for the price, at 750 gb you can fit a lot on here, I ... currently have it storing my whole music collection and backups of all my photos, videos and important documents and there is still room left for my collection to grow. The red colour is also very stylish and one of the main reasons i bought this. It is very portable and can fit easily in my bag so can take it anywhere with me. The fact that you can also encrypt the data on the hard drive is also a plus point as if your drive falls into the wrong hands, your files are safe. I have attached this drive to several different sources such as the PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 and there has never been a problem with any of them recognising it. All in all, I would definitely recommend this to others as a good little hard drive with decent capacity.
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Western Digital Elements SE Portable WDBPCK3200ABK 320 GB
by MamaC
I first purchased this exernal portable USB 3.0 disk drive made by Western Digital 2 years ago for £65 on Amazon. It stores 320GB of data and connects to your setup via a USB cable, it consumes its power from the computer so no pesky mains plug required, the transfer rate is 480 Mbps, which is an ok speed - nothing lightning though. I ... use mine with my Mac to back up all my important data, but I now wish that I went for the 1TB larger option.
DESIGN:
It's size is 7.8 cm x 12.6 cm x 1.5 cm which will fit nicely into your pocket or bag. It's sleek, very durable with it's metal case, black and lightweight (200 grams) and can be used on either PC or Mac systems. However, please note that when you take it out of the box it is preformmated for PCs ONLY. To get around this is quite simple, pop it into you Mac, > Finder, > Utilities> Disk Utility> and look for the WD drive which should be listed on the left of the box. Select the drive and then the menu will give you the option of formatting it and assigning it with a personal name. Once it's formatted, which wont take too long, then you're ready to either drag and drop files in order to back them up or you can use them very simply with Time Machne on Mac which is a wonderful little utility. Another plus is that there is no software to install or update. The manufacturers claim that it's shock tolerant but I certainly wouldn't want to drop the thing.
OUT OF THE BOX:
It comes with easy setup instructions which quite honestly you don't need. When I first plugged this device into my Mac I heard it spin for about a minute and it got hot very quickly. The computer didn't recognise it and it then died on me. Even more worrying was the elecrical burning smell that ensued. I immediately unplugged it, put it back in the box and sent it back to the seller. Fortunately it was proved that they'd sold me a faulty drive and replaced it after 11 days. Thankfully it's guaranteed for 2 years, so there's a slight peace of mind as far as that's concerned.
I now have two of this drives, my other one is a WD Passport which isn't quite as bullet proof as this one. And I've dropped it a few times on a wooden floor. Both appear to be working really well after a not very good start with the product. I would advise any reader to buy a minimum of a 1TB drive as videos, pictures and music files are becoming bigger as the world of technology grows from month to month. It's also worth noting that one back-up isn't enough you should have at least 4 or 5 back-ups of your stuff whether it be on this hard drives back-up CDs or DVDs etc. We all know it's time consuming backing everything up, but think of the consequencies if you don't spend a few mins per week or at worst per month backing your valuable data up.
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