A Closer Look

The Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB portable hard disk drive supports USB 3.0 right out of the box. Hence, it uses the new Micro-B USB 3.0 connector, which is a combination of a standard Micro-B USB 2.0 connector and a Micro-A USB 3.0 connector. This connector allows you to insert and use a Micro-B USB 2.0 cable in a pinch (if you lose the original USB 3.0 cable).

This new wider connector also allows for a more positive lock. This is useful for careless users who like to lift external drives by their cables - it makes it harder for the cable to dislodge and drop the drive, usually killing it in the process. However, this doesn't mean you should continue to do that with this drive!

Although the 500 GB My Passport Essential supports both USB 2.0 and the newer USB 3.0 interfaces, it only comes with a USB 3.0 cable. This is not an issue because the USB 3.0 cable is backward-compatible with USB 2.0 ports. You can readily use this drive and cable with any USB 2.0 (or even USB 1.1) ports. The only issue would be a much lower transfer rate as USB 2.0 has a maximum theoretical throughput of 480 Mbits/s, or about 33 MB/s in real life.

Naturally, once you upgrade your computer to USB 3.0, you will instantly experience a marked improvement in this external drive's performance as USB 3.0 offers a maximum theoretical throughput of 5.0 Gbits/s, which would translate into a real-world throughput of about 400 MB/s. We will demonstrate in our benchmark tests how much difference USB 3.0 makes over USB 2.0.

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