Review: WD PassPort Hard Drive

Another present I received from my parents this holiday, was a new portable hard drive, the WD PassPort. I got the 500GB version, plenty of storage for all my music, movies and work. One of the main reasons I asked for this was that I have run out of space on my 500GB Seagate hard drive which is full of time machine backups, and so on.

After opening the PassPort which was in a stupid heat sealed packaging container, and I cut my self opening – I was impressed at the quality of the product. The design is nice and clean – with rounded corners, it really does make it complete. I received the USB 2.0 version without firewire – I wasn’t unhappy besides If I got a new MacBook, I wouldn’t be able to use it!

First powering it on, I was impressed with the noise. It’s more or less silent! It’s even quieter than my MacBook pro’s hard drive! The transfer speed isn’t bad either copied across a 100mb file in under 30 seconds. It’s USB 2.0, so it’s capable of roughly 480Mbps.

Overall, I’m impressed – apart from one thing. One day, I was sitting at my desk it was just sitting idle – All of a sudden it made a large beep and clicked. Graham Gilbert has said it’s the curse of the WD drives, but mine is still working fine… the data on the drive is backed up in another location just in case..

UPDATE: I’ve posted the Xbench results here;

Overall 7/10.