Western Digital WD Elements SE 1 TB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive

 (192 customer reviews)

WD does listen to its customers. As proof I give you their new 1TB SE portable hard drive. No nasty bloatware gumming up the works, no unreliable connectivity. Just a plain simple drive that holds a massive amount of data in a suprisingly small unit. See we consumers can make a difference! WD congratulations on recognizing that "the customer is always right" even if it took a while for it to sink in. I'll be buying more WD products again, starting with another one of these.

UPDATE: I have had 2 of these drives for about a month now and decided I could offer more input to those of you trying to decide on a storage solution. We'll start with the CONS: I bought 2 of these drives and felt I had to return 1 because it had a loose usb port on the drive. The mini USB cable fits very snug in this port and perhaps WD over compensated for early reviews that the stability of the cable was a problem. The drive still functioned, but I was uncomfortable with the fact that the port was...Read more

Warning: as mentioned by a few other reviewers, the USB cable design on this unit is too easy to come loose, thereby impacting file backups. I've purchased dozens of external USB drives from Amazon over the past several years, from many different manufacturers. Some have been slightly better or worse than others. Out of all of these, this has been the first that has been too-bad-to-use. Stay away from this design until they fix the usb connector!

I bought this at newegg and received it today (I mostly buy Amazon stuff but newegg had a much better deal this time). It's just what I wanted, small footprint (3"x 4.38" x 0.75"), very quiet, looks neat. I was going to buy the Seagate portable 1TB ext. hard drive (expansion) weeks back for a pretty good deal at Costco but decided to wait for something that's less in size. I saw two days ago at newegg for a deal on this new item and couldn't wait so took the plunge, wishing WD would have released an improved device after all the user feedbacks on the WD 1TB passport portable version. Looks like WD did. This one is still using micro USB connector, a minor disappointed at first upon opening package but none now with the very steady connection once plugged in. There is no extra software at all on the drive, pre-formatted in NTFS. Nothing more nothing less. Typical USB 2.0 speed. Very satisfied now and will update later when I use it more.