My Passport Vs. My Passport Essential

[TheChad25]

What's the difference between Western Digital's My Passport & My Passport Essential?

I need a 1TB external drive to go with my Macbook Pro Retina's USB 3.0 & I can't find the difference between these two drives anywhere. Which one is newer & are there any actual differences except for the body style? (And they both only need one usb port, right?)

Thanks for any help!

 

[Lucion]

I have a few of these drives and the only way I can tell them apart is by the shape. The Essential has a case with rounded edges while the other has squared edges. The Essential is a few hundreds of a millimeter smaller depending on the capacity of the drive. The Essential comes in sizes up to 1TB last I looked, while the other can be had in 2GB.

If you have a lot of them then it is nice to have different shapes and sizes for the case, but I imagine that isn't an issue for most.

There is also a "My Passport for Mac" which is exactly the same but comes in silver with black trim. This is formatted in HFS+ so it works right out of the box. The others are formatted in NTFS which your mac can read but not write to without a special utility. Anyway, I wouldn't pay the extra money (I saw it for $20 more for the same drive) since you can just plug a "regular" one in and format it in less than a minute.

All the Passport drives have the same internals and use a single USB port. They don't require any more power than what USB provides.

In closing, pick the one that you like the shape and color of. Don't buy the Mac-specific one unless you just have to have the silver and black color scheme. Make sure it is USB 3.0 which all the newer ones should be.

 

[TheChad25]

I have a few of these drives and the only way I can tell them apart is by the shape. The Essential has a case with rounded edges while the other has squared edges. The Essential is a few hundreds of a millimeter smaller depending on the capacity of the drive. The Essential comes in sizes up to 1TB last I looked, while the other can be had in 2GB.

If you have a lot of them then it is nice to have different shapes and sizes for the case, but I imagine that isn't an issue for most.

There is also a "My Passport for Mac" which is exactly the same but comes in silver with black trim. This is formatted in HFS+ so it works right out of the box. The others are formatted in NTFS which your mac can read but not write to without a special utility. Anyway, I wouldn't pay the extra money (I saw it for $20 more for the same drive) since you can just plug a "regular" one in and format it in less than a minute.

All the Passport drives have the same internals and use a single USB port. They don't require any more power than what USB provides.

In closing, pick the one that you like the shape and color of. Don't buy the Mac-specific one unless you just have to have the silver and black color scheme. Make sure it is USB 3.0 which all the newer ones should be.

Thanks Lucion, that was a perfect answer!

 

[Bazzy]

Hi,

Not sure but I think I read somewhere that the differences between the two might be that that the drive is has soldered connection & cannot be removed in one & in the other it can be taken out & used elsewhere? Maybe someone can clarify!

Bazzy!

 

[mac109876]

i just picked up a 2tb My Book Essential for only $130 at bestbuy. i loaded 60 gigs of files on it from my old macbook(2008) with the usb 2.0 in under 25 min. Im just about to plug it into my new retina to transfer the files and see this whole 5Gb per second!