Pros: Writes fast and I haven't had a problem with it connecting as I have some other ones. A lot of room so I can back up my tablet and pull things off. Its light weight.

Cons: None.

Pros: std good service from New Egg

Cons: Yet another proprietary cable. Surely WD has engineers that can design to a standard connection

Pros: Plugged it in, it got recognized immediately and runs fast and smooth. I bought it for school so that I can store all my projects and files on it vs. my tablet which has a much lower disk space. Its sleek and pretty light weight compared to my last one which I lost somewhere. It comes with some great programs on it for security purposes, if you want to use it as a back up drive, or just file storage.

Cons: None.

Pros: It's a small 1TB drive that works on USB 2.0 and 3.0, requires no external power, looks stylish, and runs cool.

For typical use-case scenarios, this drive is wonderful. I keep the drive in my laptop back, and keep it pre-loaded with computer maintenance/administration software so I don't have to worry about downloading it or having to transfer it to my laptop ahead of time. It's also great at LAN parties for transferring games to one another.

Cons: Doing a low-level format with hdparm will brick this drive, and is not easy (if at all) to recover from. Because of this note, doing a hardware/manufacturer-based drive erase isn't possible, and you'll have to rely on other methods (zeroing out or randoming all sectors).

The actual hard drive is also using a USB PCB, which limits technical flexibility a bit.

To a typical user, the above doesn't mean anything, and on that note, has no other downsides that I can think of.

Other Thoughts: Average read rate is 94MB/s. Average write rate is 89MB/s. Average access time is 18ms. Read/write rates were done with 100 samples of 10MB, and access time was with 1000 samples. This is from Fedora 22 through USB 3.0. On USB 2.0, it goes to 35MB/s read and 30MB/s write (same access time, same amount of samples and same sample size as USB 3.0; tested on the same OS and computer).

secure-erase-enhanced is what will brick the drive specifically if done from hdparm. Regular secure-erase is unknown. The drive's firmware ends up getting corrupted during the process, which renders the drive unusable in any machine. Total disk space may be displayed, but any attempts at formatting will fail. Using any of WD's tools on their support page will also fail (firmware can't flash because the drive's firmware is up-to-date, format claims the drive is locked, etc). dco-restore doesn't fix this either.

WD will also not provide any firmware through email should this scenario occur (policy). I'm not entirely sure if the firmware can be reflashed through hdparm or another tool over USB, but if it can't, then recovery becomes even more difficult.

The PCB the drive itself uses directly uses USB, and does not have the expected SATA-to-USB boards most other portable drives use. So this drive can't be used internally, and on this note, you should probably just stay away from using advanced tools like hdparm because of this. I'm not sure if the PCB can be swapped out.

On Linux, if you wipe out all partitions on the disk (through gnome-disk-utility and do no partition scheme), you'll be able to see the actual hard drive itself show, and you can grab S.M.A.R.T data and test the drive. The drive manages to stick around for a few minutes after unplugging it in this state, so in order to hotplug it and have it detect again, you'll have to wait a bit or just reboot.

The idle start/stop issue known on WD drives and Linux doesn't seem to occur.

The top plastic is also swappable with other Passport Ultra devices, but this isn't recommended to do (and may void warranty).

Also note this is a hard drive (not solid state). WD has taken care to make sure the drive itself is more rugged than a standard internal drive, but it still has spinning platters and a moving read/write head. Just take care not to subject it to hard shocks or anything overly aggressive during use.

The drive doesn't seem to mount in Android (regardless of NTFS or FAT, GUID or MBR, and even from the OS itself or recovery). Tested on a Nexus 7 2013 with CM12.1.