Western Digital 160GB 2.5-inch Passport USB Portable Hard Drive
by Western Digital
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List Price: Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
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for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Western Digital 160GB 2.5-inch Passport USB Portable Hard Drive
Customer Review: USB Device not found -solution
Summary: 3 Stars
Worked well for 2 months (WD Passport 160GB) until I connected a second Passport drive to another USB port on my laptop. Long story short this Passport stopped working and reported "USB Device not Found" error when connected. All data was inaccessible.
To all of you out there who have this same problem, don't worry I have the solution and you won't have to call a Data Recovery service and pay $1000 for your data. Firstly the drive in my case is unharmed. The problem: the USB interface/adapter went bad - the drive is fine.
Solution: to maintain your warranty, carefully open the Passport by twisting the case until an edge pops up and you are able to get your fingers in and gently pry the rest of the case open. Next pull the USB interface/adapter from the drive. Then go online (amazon) and find a USB 2.0 to SATA adapter. I used "Bytecc USB 2.0 TO IDE & SATA Adapter". The adapter should have a data and a power adapter to work. Simply connect the Passport to the adapter and the adapter to a USB port. You should have full access to your data. This should work in most cases but if this does not solve your problem then you will need software in addition to this adapter to get to your data.
I give this drive 3 stars rather than 1 star because it is the smallest drive I could find at 160GB. Before this incident I would have given this product a 5 star rating. Not everyone has this problem but several people have so hence 3 stars.
Customer Review: Couldn't possibly ask for more
Summary: 5 Stars
I saw the negative reviews only after I'd bought this drive, so I was a bit nervous. I might not have bought it if I'd read the reviews first, but I'm sure glad I did buy it.
I got the drive for an important project, so I was a bit concerned. I reformatted the drive to NTFS and spent a lot of time copying data to and from it just to make sure it was solid. It worked flawlessly on my Dell desktop and my HP laptop. It worked fine when I defragmented it on Windows XP, and I also successfully ran a disk error check or two. The drive performed flawlessly for the use I'd purchased it; I backed up several XP systems prior to rebuilding them from scratch.
At the end of May I bought a 17" MacBook Pro, and it had no problems reading data from the drive (OS X won't write to NTFS drives).
I then reformatted the drive as a Mac disk (using the standard Mac disk utility), and used Parallels 3.0 to install a full Windows XP Pro virtual machine on it. I successfully installed the 100 or so Windows updates that have come out since XP SP2, and I get excellent performance while running XP from the drive. When I switch to full scree mode, you'd never know you weren't on a Windows PC. I've used more than one pure Windows machine that isn't as fast as the VM I'm running from this disk, and I can unplug the drive from my Mac and stick it in my shirt pocket. What more could anyone ask from such a small USB powered drive???
Customer Review: like a rock
Summary: 5 Stars
I have owned this particular WD drive for over a year now. It's starting to get full and I'm looking to buy another one, maybe a little larger capacity, but definitely the same brand and model.
I have dropped this thing countless times (I always seem to forget I have it hooked up to the back of my laptop) and it has survived each drop. These were not small drops either, they were drops from a good 3 feet from the ground, and onto solid ceramic tiles. One time the drop was so severe that the casing of the drive came apart, but I was able to easily press it back into place and the best part is that all my data was intact!
Some advice if you're going to buy this:
-Make sure you format it to NTFS before using it, or else you will only be able to transfer files to it that are smaller than 4GB a piece. I didn't realize it until I had already put about 80GB worth of files on to it.
-This, like any other hard drive, will have a smaller capacity than what's listed. It has to do with how different manufacturers measure memory differently.
-Be sure your computer has USB ports that can handle powering the device (I'm sure most newer computers won't have a problem). Otherwise you can buy the little adapter that lets you use two USB ports to power it.
Customer Review: Working well, so far...now it is being returned
Summary: 5 Stars
After reading of all the problems, I bought this drive with some trepidation.
As soon as it arrived I plugged it in and ran the Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics. This gave the drive a clean bill of health.
I then ran the XP chkdsk utility with the /R switch. This turned up 128 KB of bad sectors, and dealt with them.
I seems that the quality control is not what it should be, but that chkdsk can help. I'll post another review if anything changes...
...I can't post another review - this one should be reduced to one star.
In my previous review, I stated that chkdsk had found 128 KB of bad sectors. I was running chkdsk in a loop, and this number was stable.
I unplugged the device for a few hours, plugged it back in, and started the chkdsk runs again. On the very first run the bad sector total increased to 320 KB, and then remained stable at that number.
I then reformatted the drive as NTFS with no bad blocks detected.
I unplugged the drive for 30 minutes, and then plugged it back in and ran chkdsk again. This gave 192 KB of bad sectors.
Something is definitely wrong, and the unit is being returned. I don't plan on buying another.
Customer Review: Absolutely Bad drive
Summary: 1 Stars
I bought this drive three days ago. After I have a error message
Cannot copy file: {filename}. The requested sector could not be found
Support offer replacement, but this is general problem!
I found this on internet
Hi i ordered item: 327388 about a month ago and it arrived last night (was aware of the delay so no problem there). But as i was using the drive last night i peridocially got an error message "Cannot copy file: {filename}. The requested sector could not be found." This was very annoying so i formatted the drive using the western digital formatter download from the support section their site for this drive. "WD FAT32 Formatter" (ExtFat32.msi), Now the problem is words and the folowing actions fail:
Writing to the disk
Formating the disk again using "WD FAT32 Formatter"
formatting the disk using windows (ntfs mode)
I've tried all actions on multiple systems (2 desktops [xp,2000] and 1 laptop[xp])
I'm am thinking my next action would be to return the item but i am not sure if i want a refund or a replacement, have other people had issues with the drive to date? I know ists a new item so may not be much feedback yet.