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: Great for Airdisk & Time Machine on Mac
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased this external drive to connect to the USB 2.0 port on the back of Apple's Airport Extreme router for purposes of using the router's Airdisk feature and use OS X 10.5.3 to treat that volume as a Time Machine vault (this feature was disabled before 10.5.3). I chose this particular drive because it did not require an additional power source, which was a big plus for me since I am running out of outlets where my router is located. It's also one less wire to have to deal with. I also chose this item because it seemed small, and I was happy when I first saw it because it was smaller and lighter than I expected.
Before I connected it to my Airport Extreme, I connected directly to my MacBook's USB port and formatted it as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) disk with Disk Utility. This also removed the Windows applications that were preloaded onto the disk. After setting up the disk with the Airport Extreme and Time Machine, I was up and running beautifully.
My only complaint about this product is the packaging. The drive comes in one of those difficult to open plastic packages that you'll spend 10 minutes trying to open. If I had a strong razor blade or box cutter around, it would have been no problem.
Customer Review: Great Portable Hard Drive
Summary: 5 Stars
I did not reformat like most others seem to do to NTFS. It fits my needs for back up of my laptop perfectly. I have been very pleased with its operation. I cannot hear it, it only gets slightly warm (hardly noticeably). Access times are fine, I actually play mp3's and read e-Books from it.
This is very easy to install and use. Just connect the drive to your USB port with the provided cable and it is plug-n-play. I just drag the files I want onto the portable drive icon. It comes with software that will allow back ups and sync files. But I never even tried the provided software. I am happy with the way I use it so I cannot talk to how well the provided software works. I would rather continue to just drag files onto the icon of the drive, delete that software and use the extra space.
I have a five-year-old Toshiba Satellite with a speaker system that includes a USB hub. I tired connecting the cable to the hub, but noting happened. But when I directly connected to a USB on the laptop everything worked perfect. There was no need for any additional purchase. The drive worked well with single USB connector supplied. I am very happy with this and it easily stores in one of the pockets of my laptop case.
Customer Review: Excellent for data backups!
Summary: 4 Stars
This is an excellent product with a reasonable price. Data transfer rate is around 16.0 MB/sec for large files and 11.0 MB/sec for a mix of different file sizes on Vista. In short, it will take about 1 hr for backing up every of 40GB data.
Pros:
1. Light weight, small size and doesn't need external power adapter.
2. Very little heat or noise.
3. Priced right for a portable drive with 320GB.
4. Three years warranty, so the probability of failure for 3 yrs must be lower.
5. Nice design, no messy cords and multiple color choices.
Its the size of power adapter of my last external drive (WD 80GB from 2004)!
Cons:
1. Slow data transfer rates.
2. Seems fragile, don't know if it will survive a drop or rough transportation.
3. Retail packaged in difficult to open plastic.
4. I don't see any innovative technology to decrease drive failure rates.
I did a quick format to NTFS and disabled indexing on it for faster transfers. Didn't install any of the given software yet.
I would highly recommend the 320GB version over 250GB/160GB versions, so you won't run of disk space anytime soon.
Customer Review: Not bad.
Summary: 4 Stars
Overall, this is a nice external. I've owned mine for three years now, and it's behaved well, considering the price. For the first two years, it caused me no problems whatsoever; my only complaint would be that it comes as FAT32 with some special Western Digital software already on it, but that's easily taken care of.
To this day, I have had no problems with scratches or dust (why the hell does anyone care about a scratch on the case anyway?), and my transfer speeds were do-able. Not fast, not slow - do-able. The length of the cord is shorter than I'd like, but since I've started using a USB hub, it's not been an issue.
And yet... this past year, the drive will sometimes just turn itself off. It'll go right back on a moment later, but it was unnerving to the point where I bought another backup just in case (500GB, also from WD).
It does have its problems, but it has served me well, and that's what prevents me from giving this product three stars. It does what it's supposed to do - it stores your stuff with minimal fuss.
All in all, it's tiny and quiet and serves its purpose. Me likey.
Customer Review: Buyer Beware: Poorly Constructed, Far Too Fragile
Summary: 1 Stars
I can't warn users enough about the fragility of this HD. I had to find out the hard way that these HDs are poorly constructed and if you upset them in the slightest, your data will be GONE with virtually no way to have it repaired. A couple of months ago, my foot got tangled in the cord and the HD took a light tumble on plush carpet from a height of a little over 12 inches.
That was the end of my HD and a lot of my one of a kind data that I had ported over to it. Gone. Kaput.
Certainly, there is no expectation for HDs to take serious beatings but the poor construction and lack of durability on this Western Digital model is terrible. After I lost all my data, I googled and found that there are MANY others like me who have lost their precious data with this product. Repair is not an option because even at the 'diagnostic' costs of over $1,000, there's no guarantee that they will be able to fix anything. I took mine to a specialty PC shop and tried to get it fixed but the technician (owner) told me it was toast due to the way these are built (apparently a lack of access to the drives).
So BEWARE.