Pros: Works great and had excellent price and received on Wednesday after ordering on the previous Saturday. I'm very pleased with this portable hard drive.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: I recommend this product to anyone searching for a good portable hard drive. (Chase)

Pros: Compact, fast, reliable.

Not certified for Windows to Go, but works fine for that task and a lot less expensive than certified drives.

Cons: Connector cable is short and not standard USB on the device side.

Other Thoughts: I am a tech professional and use this drive for Windows-to-GO. It is inexpensive compared to certified drives and works fine.

If I wanted just a data storage device I would pick a drive with a standard replaceable cable.

Pros: Pretty small, but slightly larger than other similar portable drives: 4.35" x 3.22" x 0.60" (110.5mm x 82.1mm x 15.1mm)

USB powered.

Runs relatively cool (100 degrees F. after 15 minutes of heavy use).

Included WD Utilities application allows you run diagnostics on the drive (Similar to SeaTools), and configure the sleep times on the drive (never, 10, 15, 30, 45, or 90 minutes).

Simple but effective backup software included. You can select which files to back up, and how often do it (immediate, every hour, every day, every month). Files can then be selected for restore and placed in their original location or a directory of your choice.

Hardware encryption, which doesn't require any software to be installed (except to initially set the password.

Made in Thailand.

It boasts very respectable transfer rates, which do not appear to be affected by having security enabled.

Sequential Read : 111.107 MB/s
Sequential Write : 111.049 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 41.521 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 58.560 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.536 MB/s [ 130.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.372 MB/s [ 334.9 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.583 MB/s [ 142.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.342 MB/s [ 327.7 IOPS]

Test : 2000 MB [G: 0.2% (1.5/931.5 GB)] (x3)
Date : 2015/06/25 12:28:15
OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

Cons: The 18" USB cord is a bit limiting, but all portable disks come with the same length cord, so no points off.

The installer would not download the latest version that it said was available so I had to update after installing the applications. Not sure if this is a bug in the installer or my computer acting up.

Other Thoughts: While unverifiable, Western Digital claims to be using 256bit AES encryption, which when implement properly is secure, however we know from recent news that several hard hard drive manufacturers (including Western Digital) are working with the NSA on less than honorable things. While I am in no way condoning the storage of something the NSA would find interesting, it is likely that there is a back-door in this encryption implementation that would allow them (and who knows who else) to access encrypted data without having to break the security password.

There are a number of lightweight software based encryption tools available for free in the public domain (you can even download the source code then review it and compile it yourself if you chose). Any drive could arguably be better secured using these tools at no cost.

Having said that, for the average user who is simply trying to secure their data from the prying eyes of a thief, this device will work very well and the extra $10-15 is probably worth not having to deal with other software.