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Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 750 GB
| Caractéristiques | |||
| Capacity | 750 GB | ||
| Format | 2.5 inches | ||
| Interface | USB 2.0 | ||
| Rotation Speed | 5400 rpm | ||
| Cache | N.C. | ||
 Show all specifications
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| Write Speed | N.C. |
| Read Speed | N.C. |
 Hide specifications | |
Pierre-Jean Alzieu
Test date: March 10, 2010
Test date: March 10, 2010
Integrated Software
The Western Digital My Passport Essential comes with WD SmartWare integrated software. This package mainly allows you to check that your external hard drive is in working order and synchronise your files.
Although the softwares great looking and easy to use, saving options are fairly limited. You cant, for example, synchronise a particular photo or video, you can only synchronise all the files of a same type. This is not exactly practical and was probably not a great decision on WDs part.
Although the softwares great looking and easy to use, saving options are fairly limited. You cant, for example, synchronise a particular photo or video, you can only synchronise all the files of a same type. This is not exactly practical and was probably not a great decision on WDs part.
There are two types of My Passport Essential hard drive - the standard version and the SE version – with the SE range boasting higher storage capacities. This 2.5-inch My Passport Essential SE external hard drive is available with a capacity of from 750 GB (model tested) to 1 TB. It is only available in one colour (black), compared with five colours for the lower capacity models of 250 to 640 GB. There’s no change to the casing, although the overall size of the external hard drive has been reduced to a compact 110 x 83 x 15 mm. That explains why Western Digital has chosen to use a micro USB interface instead of the mini USB format that’s usually found on this type of product.
Slower transfer speeds than the Samsung S2 Portable
 WD My Passport SE 750 GB Samsung S2 Portable 500 GB |
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USB 2.0 transfer speeds in MB/s
The Western Digital My Passport SE 750 GB has slightly slower transfer speeds than the Samsung S2 Portable 500 GB hard drive. In both read and write modes, the Samsung outperforms WD’s model by 2 MB/s and 1 MB/s respectively. In parctice, it’ll take 7½ minutes to copy 10 GB of data onto the My Passport SE 750 GB hard drive and 5 minutes and 20 seconds to read it back.
Pluses
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Compact design
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Capacity: 750 GB
Minuses
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Access time: 18.5 ms
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The Samsung S2 Portable hard drive is faster
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USB 2.0 only
The My Passport Essential SE is a good 2.5-inch hard drive. Western Digital manages to pack a large storage capacity into a compact and well-finished casing. There are, however, faster hard drives on the market.
