Western Digital Passport -250GB

External Hard disks are gaining popularity all over the world and many have started preferring them over pen drives to gain huge amount of portable storage space.The Western Digital Passport series of its external range of portable hard disks live up to that reputation and beyond.

Here are the specs:

• Serial Bus Transfer Rate (USB 2.0) : 480 Mbits/s (Max)
• Capacity: 250GB
• Dimensions: 129.78 X 79.78 X 15 mm
• Weight : 104 gms

The 250GB Passport Hard Disks just weighs a measly 104 gms and also has small dimensions making it a perfect pocket drive. It is a 2.5″ Hard disks and hence does not require any external power supply and is a bus-powered drive.This drive is known to have problems with older laptops like Apple G4 due to their limited bus-power but that is not the case with new laptops.

The packaging bundle is not anything to boast about as it does not even bundle a manual nor a carry case which are absolute necessities. But you can find the software manual on the hard disk.The outer surface is shiny glossy black but develops fingerprints and scratches easily.

Setting up the drive is a piece of cake as it is a plug-n-play drive and gets detected by Windows,OS X,Linux as it comes pre-formatted in FAT32 partition which is recognized by all the above mentioned operating systems.The formatted capacity of the drive is 232 GB.

Coming to the performance aspect of the drive.It is one of the fastest drives available in the USB 2.0 External hard disks category.It manages an impressive 20MB/s with FAT32 formatted and 22MB/s with NTFS formatted.The read speed is around 22MB/s. It may not be comparable to some of the external Firewire/eSATA hard disks available in the market but it does not need an AC adapter either!

Pros:

• Light Weight
• Small Dimensions
• USB Powered
• Fast Performance

Cons:

• Surface prone to fingerprints
• Surface gets scratched easily
• No manual bundled
• No carry case
• Pricey compared to 3.5″ external drives

Final Thoughts

I would recommend this drive to anyone looking for high storage on the move. Its price is 200$ which is not much as cost/per GB comes out pretty low. All in all it is a perfect pocket drive and a must buy!