See your life safe in one place with WD’s My Passport Essential SE USB drive. It offers maximum storage capacity for all your important files, videos, music, photos. With visual, automatic, continuous backup your data is backed up as soon as it’s changed. Maximum capacity. Maximum style. – The world’s most popular portable drive now features maximum capacity to store all your favorite videos, music, photos, and important files. Still sleek and compact, you can load it up and take it with you anywhere.WD SmartWare – See your life safe in one place.See your backup as it happens – Seeing is believing. Visual backup displays your content in categories and show the progress of your backup.Protect your data automatically – Relax, your data is secure. Automatic, continuous backup will instantly make a second copy whenever you add or change a file.Bring back lost files effortlessly – Retrieve your valuable data to its original location whether you’ve lost all your data or just overwritten an important file.Take control – Customize your backup, set drive security, run diagnostics, manage the power settings, and more from the WD SmartWare control center.Drive lock – Gain peace of mind knowing that your data is protected from unauthorized access or theft with password protection and military-grade 256-bit hardware-based encryption.Ready to plug-and-play with Windows PCs – if you’re a Mac user, check out our Mac version of this product. [link to] USB 2.0 powered - Powered directly from the USB port on your PC. No separate power supply is needed*. An optional cable is available for the few computers that limit power from the USB port.Planet friendly – We designed a small box that uses recycled material and minimizes waste. We encourage you to recycle it. Formatted NTFS for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 , Reformatting required for Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard

User Reviews about Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBABM0010BBK-NESN (Midnight Black)

I bought mine from a local store and started reading the reviews on Amazon before I opened it. I actually delayed opening the package for like two weeks because I thought I might want to take it back due to the bad reviews. However, now that I've been using it for several weeks, I'm pleased as punch. As everyone who has reviewed this drive has noted, there are/were two major flaws: the USB connection and Smartware.

1) USB connection: Western Digital must have started replacing those cables before mine was packaged, because I honestly have never had such a tenacious USB cable. In fact, it's so secure I have to yank pretty hard on the plug to get it out at both ends. I beleive all the frustrated people who complained about theirs, but mine is rock solid.

2) Smartware: Annoying? Yes. A major problem? Not at all. Apparently there are many fixes, but the one I used took all of 15 seconds. It worked on my Vista machine as well as my Windows 7 laptop. It probably works on XP, too.

Control Panel -> Device Manager -> DVD/CD-ROM drives
Right-click on WD Virtual CD 1110 USB Device.
Click Disable.

That's it. It hasn't bothered me since and it takes up almost no space on the drive. (Thanks to Moeman32 on the WD community forums for the fix.)

I only gave this drive four stars because it took me a while to find that simple fix, but if you're reading this you won't have the same problem. I can't think of any reason not to get this drive. Enjoy! -- Great drive - no major problems for me