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| Western Digital My Book Passport 250GB Review |
| Page 2 - Appearance and Performance |
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The casing of the drive has glossy polished black plastic on the top and two of the sides, with a subtle WD logo placed in the centre. The base and remaining two sides of the case are basic matt black plastic which seems a lot more scratch resistant than the top of the drive (our demo unit had aquired quite a few very fine scratch marks on the top part of the unit). At one end of the drive is a small rubber flap which hides the USB port, there are no other buttons or ports anywhere on the drive besides a small blue circle on the side which acts as a power LED and an activity LED (flashes a brighter blue for activity). So overall a very sleek looking unit that’s not overdone at all, and as it’s such a basic device it really doesn’t need to be.
Performance of the My Book Passport is about as good as can be expected from a USB2.0 device, with a SiSoft Sandra performance benchmark coming in at 30MB/s, which is exactly the same as my own portable hard drive (Seagate 80GB 2.5” Notebook drive in external USB2.0 case), which shows that how fast the drive is inside doesn’t matter at all, because they’ll always be faster than a USB2.0 connection is able to deliver anyway. In a more real world test, it took the My Book Passport around 1minute flat to transfer a 1.4GB movie, which isn’t too shabby.
Performance of the drive does suffer a bit when using the Western Digital Sync software due to the built-in data encryption, however as it’s a software encryption the more processing power your PC has, the smaller this reduction in performance is going to be.
There aren’t too many extras included with the My Book Passport, most likely in an effort to keep the price down, however you do get a nice WD branded semi-hard protective case to store the drive, and keep track of your USB cable, a standard Type-A to Mini-B cable that is nice and short, only about 55cm long, great for notebook computers.
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Conclusion:
The Western Digital My Book Passport 250GB is a great little unit, it performs as well as you could hope for from a USB2.0 device, is very easy to install and comes with a very simple but useful backup software package. That being said it’s not a whole lot different to every other small, portable, notebook hard drive based storage device out there, until you consider than this whole unit is cheaper than buying a 250GB notebook drive on its own, so it’s outstanding value. There’s nothing on the market that comes close to the Passport, the nearest competitor is LaCie, who’s ‘Porsche Mobile 250GB’ drive sells for around AU$40 more than the Western Digital, so for AU$260 the Passport is the best choice for your portable storage.
OzHardware Rating – 10/10 – Perfect!
This product can be purchased online at www.techbuy.com.au (Direct Link)
