One of our customers recently came to us with a Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB, External, 5400 RPM Hard Drive (WDBACX0010BBK-NESN) that he wanted to take apart and insert into one of our enclosures. He did not like, as he put it, “the cheap look and feel of the plastic WD enclosure” and wanted to remove the hard drive from the enclosure and install it into one of our aluminum enclosures featuring USB 3.0, FireWire and eSATA interfaces.
It seemed like a fine idea to us until he took apart the WD enclosure only to find that the hard drive within the enclosure was NOT a SATA hard drive, but rather a USB Native hard drive.
What that means is that the drive has a USB port connected to it rather than the typical SATA connector and therefore cannot be connected to the bridge board of a normal external enclosure or installed into a laptop. Basically, it can only be used in the WD enclosure.
Our customer commented that he, “regrets buying the WD hard drive because while it was true that the drives are cheap, (both in price and quality), the lower price comes with some serious limitations”.
We want to remind our loyal customers that “cheaper” does not mean “better” and is often NOT the best choice in the long run. In fact, cheaper usually means inferior quality and may come with some very serious limitations as our unhappy customer above found out all too well.