Passport Essential 2.5" 320GB USB Hard Drive
by Western Digital Retail
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List Price: 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 off-site back-up drive
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this to store my music and photos off-site. Thus, the drive is not in use - it just sits in a drawer at work. For this, it is perfect: inexpensive, large capacity, small.
I pulled the material from my iMac/Leopard and have used it successfully with my HP Mini 1000 netbook/XP SP3 - the fact that it is formatted MS DOS/FAT 32 means that it is a perfect drive to use when transferring iTunes between operating systems - a "Mac compatible" drive would be a problem with XP.
Since I don't write to it all the time, I have no real sense of speed - but moving 187 GB of music to it took a perfectly reasonable amount of time.
Maybe it is me, but I just wouldn't think of using a tiny drive like this for mission-critical data - they're just not designed for that, no matter what anyone tells you. Every external drive, no matter the size, has a high failure rate - just read the reviews here on Amazon - and back the stuff you REALLY care about to an SSD or a DVD...
Customer Review: Portble HD saves everything
Summary: 5 Stars
A couple of years ago I bought a big deal laptop with a 60 GB hard drive. Worked fine with cameras of the time that generated 3 MB image files. Then I bought newer cameras that generated 15 MB files- whoa! I started working with Photoshop. It can generate 30 MB files. Layers, you know. Wow! I filled that laptop very quick.
What to do? I bought this portable hard drive. Formatted it right out of the box as other reviewers suggested. It acts just like another drive with a different capital letter (F:). Moved about 20 GB of images out of my computer's HD in about 20 minutes-- Roughly--. Now I have room to work on my laptop, yet keep all of my image files, at the ready. I'm not a computer geek, but I think the image files move on and off this portable hard drive at a similar speed as they move on and off the laptop's internal hard drive. For $125+ or whatever, I have the space to keep on taking photos for a much longer time. I love this portable Hard drive!
Customer Review: Excellent mini hard-drive with tons of capacity and fast response times.
Summary: 4 Stars
Bought this 2.5in hard-drive as it was a good price and I wanted to keep all my music on a seperate hard-drive which was small enough to tote around with me in my travels. Ultra small, VERY fast usb2.0 HD. I only hope I have better luck with this one then I have with previous Western Digital drives, I was a bit apprehensive due to past experiences but so far so good...
Keep in mind that although this is marketed as a 320gb drive (currently the largest mass produced 2.5in drive on the market as of sep '08) it's formatted capacity is actually only 299gb.
The elite version includes a capacity guage and slide door for the usb port but carries a substantially higher price - the drive itself is the same.
The case logic case is a nice edition but considerably larger than this tiny drive though it offers excellent drop protection as the drive won't likely survive a fall from a desk as there is no padding on the drive itself.
Customer Review: Great Hard Drive
Summary: 5 Stars
This little external hard drive is great. USB powered means that I only have to carry a single cable with me, if even that. It uses a standard A to mini-B USB cable.
There is a small white notification light next to the USB port on the device. It is bright enough to be noticed but not too bright to be bothersome.
Since it is a moving parts hard drive inside this enclosure, after safely removing the device you should wait a couple extra seconds before unplugging it. The device needs to move it's header back to a safe zone as to not corrupt any of your data. You can actually hear it still working even after you click remove device. Just wait those couple extra seconds to make sure no data is lost or corrupted. With all hard drives I recommend safely removing it through the USB option instead of just pulling the plug out.
I have had no problems with device. I use it to backup my data regularly.
Customer Review: 2nd time is not the charm
Summary: 1 Stars
I have unfortunately purchased two of the drives and have had both fail in under a year.
I've used Western Digital drives extensively in internal desktop versions (I work in IT), and felt comfortable enough buying an external drive from them. I needed something small and super portable as I do a lot of traveling and need to back up my work daily. The passport series appeared to fit my needs perfectly.
Design wise it seemed solid and small enough to fit in my pocket if need be. However, case noise and heat turned out to a serious issue during use.
The first drive failed after using it for nine months or so, which irked me, but as drives are prone to flukey behavior, I was willing to buy another. The second failed exactly eight months after purchasing it.
I have since moved on to Seagate and couldn't be happier. I plan on NEVER buying another Western Digital drive, internal or external.