Western Digital My Passport Essential 320 GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive WDME3200TN (Midnight Black)

My Passport Essential 320 GB USB Portable Hard Drive

Nowadays nobody cares about data volume and as result, we as the end users are forced to buy bigger and bigger drives. And they do come in various forms and shapes, so we here at Modreactor reached out and grabbed with our little greedy hands one such device with capacity of 320 GB, made by Western Digital (the famous rival to Eastern Analog) and in this piece of art (cleverly disguised as review)will tell you about our feelings, thoughts, mishaps and happy times with the product.

WD My Passport Essential Portable 320GB comes in rather plain box. Still, considering its price in my opinion more expensive and shiny one is unnecessary. The bundle includes USB cable, carrying pouch for the drive and the inevitable instruction booklets:

The drive itself is a small (black in our case), stylish plastic case. But if you want other colour for yours, worry not, Western Digital supply My Passport Essential Portable in various ones. You could choose any of these – white, black, two types of red, two types of blue, silver, pink or purple. The insides of the case hold 2.5” laptop hard drive. On the bottom is the Mini USB connector and the bottom right corner is marked with the WD logo:

And this is the above mentioned pouch that allows you to carry around your drive and its USB cable:

Now lets dispatch the subjective opinions first. The main advantage of this product is its size. The mere fact that it is based on 2.5” drive, makes it very suitable for being carried around. It is also very light. The capacity it has is quite substantial and does allow you to constantly move with you significant amounts of data. And it only gets better, by using standard mini USB connector and not depending on external power supply it gives you unparalleled freedom, since this type of cable is very common and you will rarely need to drag one along with the drive. And the cherry on top? It's truly Plug’n’Play and works wit all kinds of OS.

And following that train of thought let's talk about the data encryption software included in the bundle. It is of course quite useful at helping you protect vital information from being accessed by undesirable sources, but know this – to be able to read it the software must be installed on the computer from you try to access it. The other thing about it that it is for only MS Windows. So, though Linux and Mac OS software for the same purpose exists, the task of obtaining it is entirely up to you.

The WD My Passport Essential Portable design is simple and stylish, consisting of mostly black, polished surface, as you can see from the photos. The case is made from plastic and that rose the question about one rather important factor – cooling. Well, with our tests we managed to warm it up after copying 90 GB data, but that's exactly it - it was warm, not hot, so no reason to worry, apparently. Actually, considering the low speed it works on, there is just no way it will heat up too much.

And since we mentioned work speed, looks like its time to measure it. For comparison we used the following devices:

WD My Passport Essential Portable;
Revoltec Alu Book II + Western Digital Raptor 360ADFD, 10k rpm, SATA 1 (USB 2.0 + SATA;
Revoltec Alu Book II + Maxtor 6V250F0, 7200 rpm, SATA 2;
Vizo Luxon Advanced + Samsung HD642JJ, 7200 rpm, 16M, SATA 2 (USB 2.0 + SATA);
Cyber Snipa Dog Tag flash drive, 4GB;
PQI Intelligent Stick, 1GB;
CBM Flash Disk, 2GB.

As you can see, the WD My Passport Essential Portable performance is rather pleasing and cannot be compared to mere flash drives in terms of transfer speed (heck! it even laughs in the face of its 3.5” brethren). The only advantage of flash drives seems to be their access time (apparently the Cyber Snipa ain't the best of them either). Also you can clearly see that My Passport's USB controller is better suited for USB than the competition's.

Pros
Fast transfer
Large capacity
Small size
Widespread interface, no need of external power
Encryption software
Nice design

Cons
Encryption software is limited (in terms of OS availability)
Adequate price, yet slightly higher than the ones of its competitors (~140$)

WD My Passport Essential Portable is small disk drive with large... capacity. It snugly fits the pocket of your jeans, shirt, pyjamas or any other apparel of your liking. It depends on widespread interface, so it can be used almost anywhere. It has exceptionally kind appearance and decent software (in case you even care about that). You indeed get what you pay for - no more, no less.

Western Digital 320 GB USB Hard Drive

Western Digital 320GB Hard Drive