Western Digital Passport External Hard Drive

If you are constantly on the go and need a way to store lots of data to take with you in a small compact external hard drive that is easy to carry around then the Passport is for you. This small sleek looking device comes in a variety of sizes including 60GB, 80GB, and 120GB. Relatively cheap for the size and amount of storage you get you cant go wrong with the Passport.

The Passport is a product offered by Western Digital so you know it's a trustworthy hard drive right from the start. The Passport is also very small and easily portable where ever you go, weighing just 9.8 ounces and measuring 5.7 inches long, 3.5 inches wide, and less than an inch this it will fit almost anywhere. The Passport is surrounded in a hard plastic case with rubber coating on the bottom so it wont slide around on a flat smooth surface. The USB 2.0 connectors are located behind a protective cover. The only bad thing about this handy little hard drive is that it doesn't come with a protective carrying case. Other than that I can see no real design flaws or other problems, it is a nice looking hard drive.

The Passports performance is superior to any external that is this small and cheap. Installation is a snap you just plug it into your USB drive on your computer and its instantly recognized and put on your computer for use. The USB should power the device, most computers have ample power for this but if it doesn't Western Digital offers an AC adapter for $10 that can help power the device.

So what about read and writing to and from the Passport, well I ran a little test and found that it reads and writes pretty fast about 115 mbps which is pretty good for a 5,400 RPM hard drive. The one thing that the Passport lacks is any tools or software for backing up software and data. You don't get any special ways to do your backups other than just put the information on the drive. If Western Digital ever packages these types of software with the drive it will double the value of these hard drives.