» Western Digital 160GB 2.5-inch Passport USB Portable Hard Drive

Western Digital 160GB 2.5-inch Passport USB Portable Hard Drive Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: a good idea
Comment: This is a great idea. I considered it to be a great way to back up my system and files while shifting computers. It was only partially successful because it is not compatible with Mac 9 and only sporadically compatible with Mac OS X.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: WATCH out for Pricing.
Comment: This is a great drive. BUT there are drives from the SAME manufacturer that are less on AMAZON. Do a search for Western Digital Passports. This seller is MUCH TOO expensive... Sorry

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Customer Rating:
Summary: excellent
Comment: one of the creation more helpfully for me and my computer stuff. have been an excellent portable hard drive without any inconvenient until now.so I recomended 100%

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Customer Rating:
Summary: I made it function with help from a Belkin PCMCIA card
Comment: .
I purchased two of these at once; one as a gift. Neither worked because they were made for USB ports that supply more power than my Gateway or my friend's Dell put forth. Western Digital, I discovered later, states that they don't work in "some" laptops.

WD sells some affordable accessories that are supposed to boost power in the unit, (for those laptops that need more USB power to make these work.) One of the suggested items they sell is a Y-connector so you can utilize the power from two USB ports at once. This would seem to be a nuisance unplugging my USB mouse, and I had problems with WD delivering the items anyway (after ordering them twice.) Also, WD informed me by email I couldn't obtain the power boosters anywhere else except from them.

Okay... that aside for now. Let's consider the purpose of these drives and whether that purpose matches what you want it to do.

I wanted a simple mass storage device, like a flash stick only bigger. That's not exactly what these were designed for. They are cleverly designed to mimick your own hard drive so when you travel you just unplug the drive and take it to any computer and that remote computer becomes, magically, your home computer. Your email, your documents, everything appears on the remote computer as if you had brought your home computer with you... even your wallpaper is duplicated.

This seems very clever indeed but not what I wanted. So I deleted the software I found on it as my first order of business-- that stopped it from automatically filling itself with the contents of my computer.

Then I used my my computer to reformat the whole drive in NTFS. Right click My Computer, Manage, Disk Management (and... um... do be sure to format the right drive-- not your C: drive.)

Now it was clean and ready to be used as a big removable storage device-- which was what I wanted.

I had to invest $54 to solve the power problem but did so without dealing with WD. I purchased a Belkin PCMCIA 2.0 2-port USB card, which created two additional USB slots on my computer that both worked even better than the original ones. This card pluged easily into my previously unused PCMCIA slot. It came with a power cord so there is no power deficit issue.

If you use this method, do please read the instructions and don't just plug in the card. It comes with a driver to install first from a disc.

The WD Passport works fine in there now and has for three days, and I can put my flash drive in the open USB slot next to it. I'm getting fast data transfers. The WD Passport does what I wanted it to do now.

Other reviews I've read elsewhere indicate that after a short time the drive ceased to work for a few people, so read more reviews. The Belkin card was a good purchase nevertheless, I can imagine many uses for a more powerful and faster USB port, and the card doubled the number of USB ports I have. If the WD Passport fails... well... it will have worked for awhile and that's better than I had expected after I first got it home.

Oh... and I purchased a Belkin card for my friend as well. As of today I don't see this particular Belkin item on Amazon or I'd paste a link to it. I bought mine at Staples.

[...]

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Customer Rating:
Summary: WD 160GB portable hard drive
Comment: Product was great slim size, portable and works well. It was
delivered in a timely manner.

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