win a western digital 500 GB hard drive!by Lauren |
A few months ago, I got a My Passport Essential hard drive from Western Digital, and now I’m paying it forward. One lucky reader will win the Essential’s super cool older brother, the My Passport Elite 500 GB hard drive. I just recently blogged about this sexy device that backs up your precious photos and music, so I’m pretty excited to be able to give one away. Besides the fact that it packs a crazy amount of data (500 GB… that’s about 100,000 photos or 125,000 songs), the My Passport Elite is pretty darn petite — it’s half an inch thick and less than 5 inches long.
To enter, just leave a comment below letting me know how this cream of the crop hard drive will make your tech world easier. Be original, because the best comment will win. Good luck to all!
*Prize value: $150 US. Contest closes August 31st, 2009. Open to all residents of Canada, except those in Quebec. Not open to any Transcontinental Media employees, their families, or any other persons with whom they reside.*
***This contest is now closed. Congratulations to Megan Sauer who created an incredible rendition of ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel Air’ theme song, replacing the words with why she should win the My Passport Elite.***
Tags: contest, hard drive, lauren mcphillips, my passport elite, my passport essential, style at home, tech style, western digital
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I am a total non-tech person but I was intrigued by your blog about this and thought what a cool idea it was. I have a ton of pictures on my computer that have turned it into a snail. It is very cute looking
Space is such an issue–everywhere! I would love a WD Drive because no matter whether you’re a Justin Long or a John Hodgman–pictures are jpgs, songs are mp3s, and we all have way too many before we realize that our computers aren’t big enough for em!
And yeah, that’s beside the fact that it’s damn sexy in silver.
me want drive, me have no more space, me need more space, so me need drive. thank you!
wd rocks i have a wd tv and its jsut the best
I think these drives are awesome. I’m always helping my not very techie brother and his wife with their computer and I think the WD Drive would be very good for them so they can have a backup of their increasing pictures and music.
Where to begin….I could make this long and windy, but I’ll keep it as short as I can!
1 - The 10 MegaPixel camera I bought my wife for Christmas, and the fact that out daughter just turned 1 = thousands of high resolution pictures. If my internal HDD fails…i don’t want to think about it.
2 - Having all my media backed up on an external HDD would make my current situation easier; I live in Kelowna, and have been continuously threatened with evacuation from the various forest fires close to my home…..so far I have removed my internal HDD 4 times and packed it into the van, for my computer case is just to big to fit with everything else we have had to pack. Having an external HDD would make it alot faster and convenient to pack, so that I can get to the other important things.
3 - As of now, any media that I want to play on my WDTV HD Player, I have to transfer from my computer to an 8 GB thumbdrive. This can get, well, annoying, when we want to watch a movie, and I have to wait for the movies to load to the thumbdrive. The same goes for music.
So those are my reasons for wanting this sleek, small device. Thanks for the opportunity!
This will definitely make my tech life easier, since I live at two houses I need want my stuff to be with me all the time this hard drive will fulfill those worries. Not only that but I will be a great backup drives for all the games, programs and videos for my video editing work and hopefully storing anime episodes on.
I had to restore my hard drive not too long ago, and I lost almost everything. I really don’t want it to happen again, but there’s only so much I can do about it. With this economy I can’t really afford an external hard drive. Re-downloading all of my music is really getting old.
Having 4 newly computing parents and in-laws and operating my own small door to door tech service. The need to commute with data on a reliable and bus powered device is essential. Now a usb pen drive sometimes would fit the needs but i have lost so many because they are TOO SMALL. Yet lugging around a notebook just to have access to your daily tools and data is a bit of overkill to say the least. At 5×3.5 inches the My Passport Elite would be perfect in size being both visible and unobtrusive. Large enough for any media that needs to go between parents and in-laws yet it can fit in a pocket and wont get lost. Lastly, we have to face the fact that its one hot looking device. Sleek Pretty and Professional.
I would like to win My Passport Elite because in my spare time I aspire to be a creative non-fiction copywriter.
Well, actually it’s more fictional than naught. I once wrote a review of the iPod to McSweeney’s during the iPod -2.0 days of its popularity. This was after people discovered that the Rio was going to tank and thought, “Hey, maybe if we increased usability people won’t think MP3 players are awful and difficult.” Needless to say complaining about my iPod was a terrible and contrived lie I put together for the sake of being able to impress my liberal arts hating but college supportive mother who thinks being published is a sign of success. It was also a way to look cool at the overpriced liberal arts school where McSweeney’s and white men named David in the literary world are considered, uh, cool.
It’s also more non-existent than aspirational, too. The guy on Amazon.com who really loves his 3 Wolves t-shirt probably deserves this way more than I do because his success as a writer is clearly more substantial than mine. You know who else is more successful, too? The endless amount of commentors that plague newspaper forums day in and day out impressing upon the non-participatory newspaper readers that the world is full of grammatically incorrect extremists. Yes, I’m humble enough to admit they’re more successful, too.
Why am I explaining my lack of success? Because it means I have kilobyte upon kilobyte of unused text documents. Enough that apparently, I exhausted a 500GB My Book. Like wow right?
I’d love to tell you I would put really awesome photos of the family I have to yet to grow because I have yet to do something besides write or home movies. I would love to tell you that I do super-awesome and secretive work involving surveillance that will help establish once and for all that Obama is in fact a US citizen, but really I can just write up how ridiculous it is that people still contend that he was really born in the bosom of Osama because their names share so many letters.
Actually, the reality of it is that I’m a graphic designer who can type really fast and lie in a melodramatic tone and I bet I could really fill up your Passport Elite with nothing but writing. That would be creative no?
In the meantime, I’m going to stay on hold with Western Digital’s RMA department because that My Book isn’t so fictional and is in fact not working.
Hi. My name is Jillianne Hamilton and I’m a part-time music journalist, full-time Journalism student. (A poor college student, too.)
I’m also the creator, editor, designer and head writer for East Coast Overture http://eastcoast-overture.com), a website that promotes east coast (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and PEI) music through reviews, interviews and articles. I don’t even get paid for all the work I do on it.
I’m a music lover, through and through. I feel naked without headphones. My hard-drive is almost full because it’s so full of music. I simply need an external hard-drive and I would be SO, SO, SO grateful.
-Jill
P.S. I love your blog.
I have more pictures and videos on my computer than I can even count! My disk space has almost run out and I don’t like the idea of having everything on CD…an external hard drive would be really handy! Thanks!
My Passport Elite could be my passport to freedom! My laptop is loaded with photos and videos, not to mention my entire life’s work. And lately, it has been running slow and freezing too often for confort. To put it simply… if my laptop crashes my work, my memories… my whole life will be wiped off forever! So what I desperately need is My Passport Elite in shining armour to back-up all my files so I can reformat my laptop and revive it again.
When I bought a new laptop I bought another *ahem* brand of hard drive to back up my files. However, when it came time to download them to my new computer I couldn’t retrieve them from the hard drive; the software was confusing. You can only imagine how I felt losing all my files. Luckily though I hadn’t emptied my trash folder yet. Phew. But you can see why I need a hard drive that’s user friendly!
I have not long retired, and have been busy trying to put all my old family photos onto the computer, disc etc. At times I find this very confusing and wanting to give up. Seeing this sleak sexy hard drive, this could be my “PASSPORT” to the future and help me be more tech minded, and leave my laptop for bigger and better things.
There once was a girl from your school and neither thought Chaucer was cool.
She is now in a j school class that requires a external hard drive but she has no funds for it.
And that pseudo limerick was made by a fool. :p
Now this is a story all about how,
My life got flipped, turned upside down
And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there
I’ll tell you how I became obsessed with hard drives both thin and square.
On one fine day I turned on my laptop
And looked to my memory for pictures for my pop.
He had been wanting to send them all along
But when I opened it up all the pictures were gone!
I whistled for my sis and when she came near,
She said the computer had crashed and I said “oh dear”.
My dad was mad and all my documents disappeared
So I went to the store and they confirmed what I feared.
Nothing was backed-up and nothing could be done
So they suggested a hard drive that cost a ton.
I sighed to myself and took a seat
As I was way too poor for My Passport Elite.
But when I came home thinking things were done
There was this contest that made it seem fun!
So now it could be possible for little old me
To get a hard for no fee!
(Please pick me!)
i always fear my laptop crashing on me in my most vulnerable i-really-should-have-finished-this-essay-two-weeks-ago-instead-of-now-when-its-due-in-5-hours state; or having it stolen while taking a short study break (2 minutes, i swear) at the library, with all my study material on that one hercules of a harddrive. naturally, the solution to this would be to back up all my precious documents & media onto a cd…but what tedious work that is without rewriteable cd’s! and unless your next post is of a snazzy-plaid-cedar-laptop-bag-decorated-with-little-twitter-birds-REMIX that makes carrying around dozens of cds light as a feather…this passport elite would be oh so handy!
Our family uses 3 computers and every photo or music file gets downloaded somewhere…. that’s the key… somewhere. It would be an amazing help to have this awesome little device to keep our photos and music in one place, where we don’t have to spend hours (I mean this! literally) searching.
About 3 years ago I bought my first passport drive and have fallen in love with them ever since. Backup is actually the last thing I use them for as it is much too convenient as a regular portable storage while on the fly between the home, office and client visits.
Unfortunately, the last passport I had (320g) met a cruel end as it fell out of my bag as I was running across the street and was crushed by a car. I am now back to my original 120gig passport which requires juggling a lot more data than i’d care to. A 500 gig solution would be much better and given the size and the aluminum casing may stand a better chance if it were to meet the same fate as the previous drive. Car vs. Hard Drive Round 2 may result in a win for the undersized!
I would like to win the My Passport Elite 500 GB hard drive so that my family and I could back up all our most precious files! It is so portable I could also put pictures and videos on it when I want to show them to some friends instead of lugging over a laptop or trying to send them over e-mail/chat/internet file sharing/etc.
Funny. I thought the idea was how it would make your tech life easier…. Which I see no case of in that rendition….
I’ve just bought a Western Digital Hard Drive on the ’second hand market’. I was so happy that I finally found one..
But now it doens’t work