Passport Essential 2.5" 320GB USB Hard Drive
by Western Digital Retail
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List Price: Our Price: $64.99 You Save: $115.00 (64%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Passport Essential 2.5" 320GB USB Hard Drive
Customer Review: Works great, until it is accidentally dropped 30 inches
Summary: 2 Stars
I had this drive for about 4 months and all was great with it. One day my four year old child was playing and accidentally bumped the table the drive was on and it fell approximately 30 inches onto the wooden floor. The case showed a slight separation along the long edge but it snapped back together with some aligning and slight pressure. I then noticed intermittent computer "freezes" and soon discovered that this was occurring during file transfers to the drive, and it would stop part way into the transfer and cause my laptop to lock-up. After a reboot of the system, and running chkdsk on the drive, it would find bad sectors in the location where the file transfer had placed the file. I can read files without experiencing lock-ups but as soon as I try to copy any file to the drive, it locks my system up. I don't believe it is that unusual to have active children running around, and accidents do happen, but a 30 inch drop onto a wooden floor should not have rendered this drive useless. I am now replacing this drive with an iOmega rugged version, and sending this drive back for warranty repair. When I get this back from Western Digital, it is going to be used on my desktop system where it is less prone to accidental drops. In a nutshell, this drive does not seem capable of handling a drop so look to buy a ruggedized version, especially if you have an active household with children doing what kids do best...playing hard!Customer Review: A good looking, slow transferring, extremelly portable hard drive
Summary: 4 Stars
This is my third external portable hard drive. This is a very light and good looking drive. I really love its look. Once it was plugged in my laptop pc, it was recognized right away. It works constantly well with one of my three usb ports of my T60 laptop. But for the other two ports, it lost the connection very frequently. I guess this is a power issue. I bet this drive will be super fast if it uses a line using two usb ports as my the other one. This is why I rate it as 4 instead of 5 stars. The transferring speed of this drive is way slower than my Seagate free agent desk external hard drive, as well as my old hard drive with Macally PHR-250CC FireWire enclosure (it requires two usb ports or one 6pin firewire port). It took more than half hours to move 30G media file from Seagate external drive to this one while it took less than 10 minutes easily for my other two drives to move these big files. But it is acceptable as long as you don't want to copy big files from one to this one urgently. I also run a Warcraft computer game from this drive. It works smoothly.
It should be noted that the blue light indicator on the back of the old version passort disappears on this new version. Instead, A usb white light indicator is placed right besides the usb connection port.
Overall, I think this is good drive with large enough capacity. I wish some day usb port can provide more power though.
Customer Review: Good, but could be better
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this drive after needing to upgrade from my old 160 gig drive. It was also a Western Digital, which worked great and I loved it. I've given it to my mom who doesn't need as big of a drive as I do, and it still works. This one does the job too, but it could be better.
I followed the instructions of the other users and deleted the included software and converted it to NTFS. I didn't use the software from my old hard drive, so I didn't feel the need to keep it. As for converting, it took me forever. I followed the instructions on the other reviews, and it wouldn't work. I googled the problem I was having, found the answer, and ran into another snag. This went on for a couple of hours. Eventually with the power of google searches I figured it out.
However, converting the drive to NTFS isn't necessary, but supposedly it makes the file transfers faster. Which brings me to my next point: the transfer rates are slow.
Overall, the product works. It is just that the functionaliy could be better.
Cons
- Converting to NTFS was a pain, but this isn't necessary to use the product.
- Converting to NTFS uses up a gig (it should have been formatted as NTFS already).
- The transfer speed is slow, even after converting to NTFS.
- My old WD came with a case. This one does not.
Pros
+ USB plug 'n' play.
+ Sleek design
Customer Review: Excelent choice
Summary: 5 Stars
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This is an excellent product if you're looking for some small, nice and useful portable drive. It's very tiny and slim. Materials are good, with shiny cover. The cable is just one USB, so you don't need any other connection or AC adapter. It doesn't need additional power than the Pc one (via USB). It came with a software to manage your folders in computer, so you can copy them with that software and carry with you all your mail and documents. I also bought a CaseLogic case to protect the hard drive and together was very cheap, compared to another memory options.
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El cable es uno solo USB, así que no necesitas ninguna otra conexión o adaptador de corriente. No necesita más corriente que la de la pc (vía USB). Viene con un software para organizar tus carpetas de la computadora, así que puedes copiarlas con ese software y llevarlos contigo todo tus correos y documentos. Yo también compré un estuche CaseLogic para proteger el disco duro y juntos fueron muy baratos, comparado con otras opciones de memoria.
Este es un excelente producto si estás buscando algun pequeño, bonito y útil disco duro portable. Es muy pequeño y delgado. Los materiales son buenos, con una cubierta brillante.
Customer Review: Really Horrid Drive
Summary: 1 Stars
For Mac users at least, this is an absolutely demonic drive. (Mine has 1Tb capacity but the problematic software is virtually the same.) The problems lie mostly in the software, not the drive itself. Why is it necessary to install proprietary driver software to use this drive when most drives simply use the built-in drivers in the Mac OS? And why does so much drive space have to be wasted on a separate virtual (virtually, stupidly wasteful) partition that cannot be erased? The HD Smartware drivers for Mac have absolutely gummed up my new MacBook Pro running 10.6.4. The smartware demons running in the background (even when the drive is not plugged in!) eat up tons of memory, plus hog as much as 98% of the CPU, making other programs like Safari stand stock-still for minutes at a time. Force-quitting the demons using Activity Monitor doesn't help, because they simply re-start and, while they're running, slows every other process down to a crawl or not working at all. Plus, I'd mention that the proprietary mini-USB cable failed after just two months and was hard to replace. Overall, this is one of the worst pocket drives I've ever owned. Oh, did I mention it was very, very expensive compared to the competition? Why pay less when you can get ten times the aggravation?