I remember way back in 2008 when Western Digital announced a new product called the My Passport Essential that the company designed to be the first truly all-in-one back-up solution for the average consumer. The company launched it just in time for Mother's Day and it was available in ten different colors to make sure you got the color of your preference. The idea behind the My Passport Essential was to make backing up your data as easy as possible to an external device that was small and easily portable and store-able in a safe or a desk drawer. The idea of a simple backup solution that comes with the needed software to back up, retrieve and secure your files is ingenious. When these drives first came out many users were buying external hard disk and then having to buy third-party applications like Acronis True Image and setting everything up yourself. With the the My Passport Essential drive you just plug it in an open USB port, run the software once, and you can forget all about it until you need it since there is an automatic backup mode. Back in 2008 when these drives were first announced the largest My Passport Essential capacity you could get was 320GB, it used the High-Speed USB 2.0 interface to connect to your PC and cost a whopping $179.99! On September 15th, 2008 WD announced a 500GB version for $219.99 in the My Passport Essential series that was also USB 2.0.  That was a fair amount of money at a time when the United States was just starting to enter a recession. The prices of electronics and computer components have drastically fallen over the past few years and you can now nearly three years to the day later you can get a a My Passport Essential 500GB with the new and much faster SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface for $69.99 shipped!  You really have no excuse for losing data these days when backing up is so affordable.