Product ReviewsHard disks
Whereas Freecom's ToughDrive and WiebeTech's ToughTech XE are built with protection from bumps and bangs in mind, Western Digital's Passport hard drive is all about easy portability. This 250GB Passport is surprisingly light, and its plastic casing is only marginally bigger than the drive itself. It would happily fit in a shirt or jacket pocket and would take up next to no room in a laptop bag. However, there is a price to pay for this convenience. The Passport's plastic case feels as if it would crack if it were dropped or had pressure applied to it inside a bag. What's more, it has only one interface port - a mini USB 2 socket. A supplied cable converts this to a full-sized USB plug, although the cable is only 6in long, which limits where you can put the drive when it's connected. It will be fine hooked up to a MacBook or MacBook Pro, and will sit on a desk underneath an iMac or alongside a Mac mini. But it will prove tricker to
In our tests, using Xbench, the drive recorded transfer speeds of 17.4MB/sec for sequential uncached writing using 256K blocks, and 20.6MB/sec for sequential uncached reading. This is about half the transfer speeds recorded when we tested the WiebeTech ToughTech XE and significantly slower than the Freecom ToughDrive. Both those drives were tested over FireWire 400, and the difference in test results shows that while USB 2 and FireWire 400 may have a similar theoretical maximum throughput, FireWire is by far the best performer in real-world use. On the plus side, the Passport costs less than half the price of the 200GB ToughTech XE and just over two-thirds of the price of the 250GB ToughDrive, making it exceptional value. There is a real trade-off to be made with the Passport: the convenience of a very slim, high-capacity drive at a very reasonable price versus a drive that is built to withstand the knocks and bumps of being carted around in a laptop bag and comes with a choice of interfaces. Which you go for will depend on the kinds of files you want to carry around with you. If you need to transport high-resolution photos, images, audio or video, you'll want the faster transfer speeds of FireWire or eSata. If you're mainly carrying Word and Excel documents, USB 2 is fine - but do you really need 250GB? If you don't need the added protection of the ToughDrive or ToughTech and are happy with USB 2 transfer speeds, the Passport is good value for money. By Kenny Hemphill
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
