WD 1TB Silver My Passport Ultra Metal Edition Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBTYH0010BSL-NESN

I purchased this 3T Passport Ultra Metal Edition to hold my Music. I love it! Of course, I'm kind of a Passport Girl.PROS1) It's small and won't clutter your desk top.2) It works with Mac O/S El Capitain!!! Just follow the simple instructions available on the WD website.3) Passport Ultra HDs are work-horses. (I chose to purchase this one, because my 2T Passport Ultra is chugging along beautifully.)4) The Metal Edition matches my MacBook Pro. It's a cool-looking peripheral and fashion accessory all in one.Sort of a Con1) The Passport Ultra Metal Edition is the same plastic as all Passport Drives on the bottom. This is not a detriment. These drives are designed and built to last. However, if you are concerned about transporting your Passport Ultra, amazon.com sells cases.

This metal edition has a slight price premium over the plastic one, and whether that is worth it is up to you. I think it is, but I'd imagine it will be similar to the plastic enclosure in just about every way.First off, the drive is formatted for Windows. This would be readable on a Mac, but not writable. If you re-format it to exFAT, you can read/write on Windows and OSX without issue. This is what I've done and the drive is usable on both operating systems. It would almost certainly work in Linux using any file system (more on this later). You can also format to the Mac HFS+ system, but you lose some compatibility.The drive comes with a software suite, which I really wasn't too interested in. One thing I did want is the encryption, as I tend to take external drives with me on travel. There is some software for that, but it does appear to be limited to setting it up and doesn't appear to be needed on an ongoing basis just to use the drive. There's an option in that software to automatically unlock on your main device, which is convenient as using this at home, the encryption is something that can get in the way as you don't really need it in a trusted environment.Now, I thought the encryption would be of some use, but I really expected it to be a Windows-only feature, but I'm happy to say that it is not. I have the drive formatted in exFAT with encryption enabled, and it works across both operating systems. On my Macbook, I enter the password to unlock it, as they're both mobile devices and I want the drive to stay encrypted in case both are stolen together. Reads and writes with the encryption work across Windows and OSX using exFAT formatting. That definitely exceeded my expectations as the expectation was that I wouldn't be able to reliably use the encryption across platforms. One thing to note is that there is no support for Linux with the encryption. I never expected that, but it's something to be aware of. I'm over it, but I would prefer to have better support for Linux.As to the performance, the drive is speedy enough. I get around 100MB/s with encryption. It supposedly has hardware-based encryption, and that seems to keep up with the drive, de-crypting and encrypting without a performance hit. As to whether you can rip this open and put it in your PS4...I doubt it. External drives now appear to have the bridge chip for USB on the drive itself (they are not USB native like many conclude). This saves money as well as enables shorter length on the cases. The internal and external drives are also different markets, so it doesn't surprise me that there are barriers with buying externals and trying to make them internal.The looks? Pretty nice. It should be noted that the larger capacity models are thicker than the lower capacity, likely as the bigger drives are usually 13mm high whereas the smaller ones are 7-9mm. You'll see this in the images, but it's something to be aware of. The bottom is plastic, which is understood. The 'feet' are rubber to preven the drive from sliding around.As to reliability, so far so good, but no device is good enough to trust with a sole copy of something important. It's really best you not learn that lesson the hard way.

Ok, this works with a Mac but you should know that it comes formatted for Windows which means when you plug it into your Mac that it will show up as read only...which is annoying. It's pretty easily remedied, though. You go into Disk Utilities and under Partition you need to create '1 Partition' and make sure your Options (the button in there) are set to the top option (GUID, disk for Mac). The format is MAC OS extended journaled. When you click 'Apply' this will erase all your data if you already have stuff on there from a windows machine. If the volume won't unmount, you need to go to the command line and use diskutil to make it unmount. You may have to use the force option (I had to). Then you go back to Disk Utilities and create the partition. Anyway, I'm not going into go into that part in detail because if you're comfortable at the command line then you know how to google until you find the right answer (it should come up right away if you google the error message from Disk Utilities).If you're not comfortable enough to do that and don't know what a partition on a hard drive is, do yourself a favor and call a mac nerd. Don't risk accidentally reformatting something you didn't mean to or screwing up this drive. Like others have said, it's nice and fast. I'm used to SSDs now and wondered if I'd feel the speed difference but so far, so good.In all, if you're fairly competent and hardware stuff, getting this HD ready for a mac should only take about 3 minutes.

I received my 3 TB WD Blue-Black My Passport Ultra Metal Edition external hard-drive this evening. In the looks department this hard-drive is gorgeous. It's almost weightless, It measures 4.375"x3.125"x0.75". My laptop has USB 2.0 ports, and the cable that comes with the hard drive works perfectly. The cable is only a foot long! I wish it were at least another foot in length. A Blue light turns ON when the hard drive is connected to your device. The light flickers, if data is being transmitted which is helpful when downloading large files.Actual space available is 2.72 TB. It has 308 MB of software/Manuals/others loaded, out of the box. You still loose about 277 GB, just because of the way space is calculated and advertised. This is normal. You can probably blow the 308 MB of software to gain that much space, but I wouldn't. Also, The software to lock your drive is on it, you will have to install this application for it to work. The packaging is fantastic. It comes with a sheet that has all the technical support info that you will need.Hope this helps!