Ankur Gupta
Wandering in time...
I had been thinking about buying an external hard disk from a long time due to lack of space on my HP DV6516TX laptop as it has only 160GB Hard Disk and my 2 mbps MTNL Triband broadband is quick to download loads of data in a single day.After researching a lot about external hard disks I zeroed in on this one mainly because of two reasons:
* It is a 2.5″ Hard drive and hence does not need external power
* It is one of the very few 2.5″ drives that come in 250GB capacity
*ankur-gupta.com/images/wdfPassport_Portable_3.jpg
Portability was one of the prime factors for choosing this drive and it lives up to that reputation and more as it weighs only 104 gms which is exceptionally light and can be carried around easily in pocket as it dimensions are also small.I bought the Glossy Black color to complement my laptop
Some of the downsides include the outer surface is prone to oily fingerprints very easily thus making it hard to keep it shiny and also it develops scratches pretty easily.
The bundled package didn’t have anything much to say with just a USB cable being supplied along with the drive. it didnot even include a manual
A soft copy of the manual is although available on the hard disk itself. The company didnot even care to give its customers a carry bag which is an absolute necessity for a portable product.
The setup was a breeze as it is a plug-n-play drive and was recognized easily by Windows Vista in a matter of seconds. The contents on the hard drive included Acrobat Reader setup and some Google goodies like Google Desktop and Picasa other than its proprietary synchronization software WDSync which requires installation on the hard disk to function.
Coming to the most important part ie. performance of the drive! The drive comes preformatted in FAT32 partition to make it compatible with both Windows and OS X. The formatted space available on the drive is 232GB.To gauge its performance I copied a 2GB file to the passport and it took 105 seconds to copy the file giving an average write speed of 20MB/s which is very good considering that it is a 5400rpm drive and works on USB 2.0. I formatted the drive with NTFS partition and repeated the same test again and got an average write speed of 22MB/s an improvement of 10%! To sum it up , it is not one of the fastest drives that can compete with Firewire drives available in the market but certainly offers excellent performance for a USB 2.0 drive.
Conclusion: The positives of this drive outweigh the negatives by a big margin hence making a very good buy.I cared less for the scratchy surface than the portability of the drive.I cared more for its USB powered interface than the performance of the bulky 3.5″ firewire drives that need a separate AC adapter. All in all this drive is worth buying if you need high storage capacity on the move at a decent price.Its price in India that I bought it for was Rs. 6750/- only.
My Rating:4/5
Source
* It is a 2.5″ Hard drive and hence does not need external power
* It is one of the very few 2.5″ drives that come in 250GB capacity
*ankur-gupta.com/images/wdfPassport_Portable_3.jpg
Portability was one of the prime factors for choosing this drive and it lives up to that reputation and more as it weighs only 104 gms which is exceptionally light and can be carried around easily in pocket as it dimensions are also small.I bought the Glossy Black color to complement my laptop
Some of the downsides include the outer surface is prone to oily fingerprints very easily thus making it hard to keep it shiny and also it develops scratches pretty easily.The bundled package didn’t have anything much to say with just a USB cable being supplied along with the drive. it didnot even include a manual
A soft copy of the manual is although available on the hard disk itself. The company didnot even care to give its customers a carry bag which is an absolute necessity for a portable product.The setup was a breeze as it is a plug-n-play drive and was recognized easily by Windows Vista in a matter of seconds. The contents on the hard drive included Acrobat Reader setup and some Google goodies like Google Desktop and Picasa other than its proprietary synchronization software WDSync which requires installation on the hard disk to function.
Coming to the most important part ie. performance of the drive! The drive comes preformatted in FAT32 partition to make it compatible with both Windows and OS X. The formatted space available on the drive is 232GB.To gauge its performance I copied a 2GB file to the passport and it took 105 seconds to copy the file giving an average write speed of 20MB/s which is very good considering that it is a 5400rpm drive and works on USB 2.0. I formatted the drive with NTFS partition and repeated the same test again and got an average write speed of 22MB/s an improvement of 10%! To sum it up , it is not one of the fastest drives that can compete with Firewire drives available in the market but certainly offers excellent performance for a USB 2.0 drive.
Conclusion: The positives of this drive outweigh the negatives by a big margin hence making a very good buy.I cared less for the scratchy surface than the portability of the drive.I cared more for its USB powered interface than the performance of the bulky 3.5″ firewire drives that need a separate AC adapter. All in all this drive is worth buying if you need high storage capacity on the move at a decent price.Its price in India that I bought it for was Rs. 6750/- only.
My Rating:4/5
Source
