WD Passport

For my spring classes I will be using photoshop a lot (MAC at school/Vista at home) and I'd rather get an external hard drive instead of an 8GB flash drive, I kept losing my other one ... I wonder where it is

I already have a WD 400GB drive.

How reliable are the western digital passport drives?

 

well, i really like my passport II. i bought it around 1 year ago (120GB) and i´m carrying it around everyday.

the drive already had to withstand some really hard shocks and it still is working perfect. i´ve been very rough with this drive, and the only thing is the case, thats not looking good anymore.
there are lot´s of scratches and bigger spots where the shiny surface is "bruised", but the case and the drive seem to be very solid.

i would buy this one again, in case i will break this thing some day.

 

The main problem with WD Passports would be the quality of the casing, which gets easily scratched and doesn't seem to have any special protective properties. LaCie and Freecom make very high quality water/dust/shock proof portable HDs if you are concerned.

 

what do you mean by reliable? do you mean running them over long periods of time? Having them bang around in a bag while you are moving from class to class or what not?

 

Well, it does come with a casem a neopreme one.

 

I've got the 80GB version and love it. It's very easy to scratch the glossy black casing with swirl marks so I would recommend leaving it protected or with some sort of case. Otherwise I love how it's just powered from the USB port (though I heard some additional power might be needed for the 160GB model but not sure).

Some people say that the USB cable that comes with it is too short; short enough so that you can't route the cable behind the desk.

 

Who cares if the case is scratched as long as the hdd runs! I like the glossy look too. I have a 120GB black one and a 160GB red/black one and while I thought the colors were cool at first, now that the surface is all marred and scratched, the drives continue to work fine.

But I am wondering why one came with a shorter cable than the other? My 120GB has one about 10 inches and 160GB is about 16 inches.

 

I have the 250Gb version. I almost never unplug it and it has been working strong for the last 7 months or so. The shiny surface will get scratches but short of that it seems somewhat rugged enough. I did invest in the hardcse though for when i am on the move. I got it cheap on ebay and I'll say that it is more than worth it. The prices on the 250 are really low since the release of the 320.

 

By the way, just a note to remember, if you are working between Mac OS X and Windows PC, format the external hard drive to be FAT32 so it can read and write to both operating systems.

NTFS (Windows) can be read by OS X, but not written to, so you can't edit or add any files to the external hard drive on a Mac.

HFS+ (Mac OS X) can't be read or written to from a Windows PC without extra software, so that's pointless.

So it has to be FAT32, unless you want to buy third party software so your PC can recognize Mac-formatted HFS+ drives .

 

But also keep in mind that since it's a FAT32 partition you can't have a file that's more than 3.99GB.

Edit: I have a WD Passport 250GB too, and so far that thing is great.

 

160 gb here, just use it to transfer stuff like a flash drive. works great (with the supplied cable)

 

If the worst problem my external harddrive ever had was a scratched up casing, I would say it's doing pretty good. The casing is just a piece of plastic along with the gloss. If you want it to look prettier, i'm sure you can sprinkle glitter on it and it will still work

Hardware reliability > looks.

 

Now Skinit just needs to offer skins for them!

 

i've read somewhere that the average speed for these passports in general is around 22-25MB/s. If I were to put it in a different enclosure with additional connectors, i.e. FW800/400 or eSATA, are the gains worth the extra cost or is there a ceiling for these 2.5 drives? I've seen reviews stating around 40MB/s for FW400 and about 60MB/s for FW800, though I think i have yet to see a review using eSATA for 2.5" drives