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Hi airfrancisco, how did you manage to get it opened? I could not make the round side where the two flaps of the U-shaped part detached: supposedly it should go like this (looking from its short side):
⊂⊃ ----------> ⊂= + —

but while I can partly open the two flaps of the U-shape, the last bit just resists to detach. Please help me!

Many thanks,
bessel

Hello, which one did you get? I got the essential and I don't know if it's the same thing with portable. Anyway, I unsnap all around on both side, then easily slides off to the right. I think you simply unsnap starting from the top right corner down to the bottom right corner, then you slide it off.
 
I can't figure out how to open the passport essential drive without damaging it. The earlier drive was easy but this book U design is trickier. Can someone create and post a you tube video on how to open the WD passport essential unit. Much thanks.
 
I can't figure out how to open the passport essential drive without damaging it. The earlier drive was easy but this book U design is trickier. Can someone create and post a you tube video on how to open the WD passport essential unit. Much thanks.

What I did was unsnap the corners then easily slides off to the left.
 
Wow... this is an innovative idea! I might give it a shot with my little iomega portable, so long as I can swap drives for sure.. (I'll have to check out the specs). How fantastically clever! Anyone know a good place where I can find instructions on how to replace the drive on my 15 inch powerbook g4?
 
hey, I just registered here to say thanks about these info!!
me too i was shopping for an upgrade on my mbp and this 320GB essential was cheaper at Staples than even an ebay internal HD. so I was hoping to swap the two HDD, and im glad to see im not along to have such idea :)

right now im having difficulty openin the essential, so a youtube video would be MUCH appreciated!!
 
I got the drive out of the enclosure and into my computer. It works great.
There is kinda a snag getting it out of the enclosure. There are clips on the top and the bottom that are supposed to come undone somehow. I pulled them away form the drive middle. This snapped off two of the clips inside the case. It holds together just fine tho. Didn't leave any marks on the outside.
Id recommend maybe some glue to put it back together if needed.
A few beers and some patience it took about 20 mins or so to get it undone.
Good Luck.
 
Different HDD

I took the plunge today and bought a 320 GB Passport Essential from PC World for £69.99. Felt wrong opening the packaging and then immediately prying the thing apart with my penknife! Warning, it is tricky unclipping the 'pages' part of the housing at the top and bottom, in the end I used matches to hold the bits I had opened open, whilst I worked on another edge. Took me about 30 mins, but then I was there.

The first thing I noticed, as I have heard on these forums, the drive is no longer a standard Scorpio, it is labelled WD Branded and has a part number WD3200BMVS.

I am going to look into what difference this makes and will report back!
 
WD3200BMVS v. WD3200BEVS

Ok, the only difference I can find is the product range the drive is from, it is all in the four letter code. BMVS v. BEVS

B = form factor (2.5")
E = Mobile Scorpio non-FFS
V = 5400 / 8MB cache
S = 22-Pin SATA

from this site

So I am guessing M just means it is from a Passport, which is a WDME3200, the E is for Essential (L = Elite, S = Studio).
 
Time Machine

One final note to anyone about to try this, I cloned my hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloner, took about 4 hours for my 232GB of data (though the first 50 GB took the longest, lots of small files, it seemed to do the system ones first).

Anyway, once complete I did a backup to my Time Capsule, it spent more than three hours (I went to bed after that) preparing, and when I woke up this morning it had failed due to insufficient disc space. It basically wanted to re:back up the whole drive, even though it recognised the previous backups.

I deleted the old backup file from the TC and am now running an 'initial' backup.

It might be because I changed the HD name from Macintosh HD to MacBook HD but it would probably have happened anyway.
 
Has anyone noticed a drop in battery performance since swapping their hard drive with a WD essential, my MB only gives me 4 hours before it was 5 I am sure. Definitely no better anyway...
 
dam is this a hassle !

replaced drive 120 for a 320gb took a while unscrewing and putting back in .
went to find my mac os dvd - darn thing has a crack on it ! and the only backup i have was a disk image on my Time Capsule - since i can not boot to the bit where i can restore from backup i was getting worrid.

so after many a panic around - i descovered that my MBP hdd that i placed in the WD caddy was bootable !:D

slow as it is on usb 2.0 but now i can burn a backup dvd install from my Time Capsule and hence re-install my system to original !

so moral of the story is folks! make sure you have all the tools you need for the job!

1 WD 320GB Essential (£69)
1 T6 Screwdriver ( £10 as part of a pack )
1 Small Philips screwdriver ( as above)
1 Restore DVD or Retail DVD of OS
4 Time.

result = priceless, well until Tuesday when they put the dam things in as Standard ;)
 
I took the 320GB WD Scorpio drive out of a Passport Elite and swapped it into My 2008 1.83Ghz Mac Mini. I used the 80GB drive in the Mini and put it into the WD Elite enclosure for backup. This Scorpio drive works great in the Mini. I used Superduper and a USB to SATA adapter cable to migrate from one drive to the other.
 
The My Passport Essential SE 640GB does not contain a disk suitable for a Mac Mini or a laptop. The disk is SATA but the SATA connector is missing, and has been replaced by a USB connector soldered onto the disk's circuit board.

It's not a detachable USB-to-SATA converter - I triple checked because I didn't believe it either - the USB interface is now integrated directly into the disk.
 
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