Western Digital WD Elements 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive

I bought this Western Digital WD Elements 320 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDBAAR3200ABK-NESN (Black) last week at, I regret to say, Target - not Amazon. Target had it "on sale" at $59.95, an irresistible price. This unit works perfectly with Linux (both Ubuntu Linux - which is my main computer's operating system - and the modified-Xandros Linux found on the ASUS Eee PC 1000 10-Inch Netbook (1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB Solid State Drive, 20 GB Eee Storage, Linux, 6 Cell Battery) Pearl White which I own) and, naturally, Windows. (It is "pre-formatted" for Windows - it has some programs incorporated which I of course immediately deleted as I do not use...Read more

I retired my little Passport for use solely as a backup for my MacBook, since they had the exact same size hard drive. So then it was time to shop for a replacement to move data back and forth between my PC's and Mac's. There was a great deal for this little gem that I saw on [...] from Dell, so I scooped it up. It seems like a great drive. It is substantially faster than my Passport, so that was a plus. It moves back and forth from machine to machine, up and down the stairs, gets carried around in the briefcase and works like a charm. My only complaint was that I had to wipe it and reformat it in order to be able to have the Mac write to it, but that took only a few minutes.

Very happy with this purchase!

This thing is the exact same width and length as the passport, but slightly thicker. It really is like a brick, and is not the slickest looking thing out there. But I LOVE the matte casing. My 500gb passport got so scratched up from the tiniest handling that I dread smooth shiny surfaces now. I don't know why this only has 1 yr warranty as oppose to the passport's 3 yrs. But hopefully it's of the same quality I've always been expecting from WD. The price was good, and amazon surprisingly delivered it super fast even with super savers s/h. Ordered on black friday and got it today on a Monday. Quite happy so far.