| Article Index |
|---|
| Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB Review |
| 2 - Features |
| 3 - Installation/Operation |
| 4 - Conclusion |
| All Pages |
Installation/Compatibility:
The My Passport Elite is compatible with both Windows (2000 and later) and MAC OSX systems straight out of the box, thanks to being pre-formatted with the FAT32 file system, so it’s truly plug and play in the truest sense. Whilst having FAT32 makes it nice and compatible, as soon as I plugged in the drive, the first thing I wanted to do was get some data onto it so I could test its speed, so I picked the biggest thing I could find, a 7GB .mkv High-Definition movie file and copy/paste it on to the new drive. Shock horror, it wouldn’t copy, saying there wasn’t enough space (on an empty drive!).
After a quick Google search to see what the hell was going on, I found my answer (which I should have known but didn’t think of it). The FAT32 file system has a max file size of 2GB, and thinking back about it, I have never really used a drive this large with FAT32, nor dealt with files this large on any FAT32 drive, they’ve always been NTFS since the days of Windows 2000, so that’s 8 years and much smaller drives and files ago so I’d forgotten about the size limitation. Given that single file sizes over 2GB are not exactly rare these days, sticking with FAT32 simply for MAC compatibility is an odd choice given the downfalls, when MAC users could simply reformat the drive into HFS+ to get it working on their system, it would take all of about 2 minutes.
To get round the file size limitation the drive can be easily reformatted with the NTFS file system so large files won’t be a problem any longer, this can be done easily with the Windows drive management tools, and once you’ve installed the included software and backed up the installation files off the drive, this is what I would do if I bought one of these drives for myself.
An excellent inclusion from Western Digital is the very short USB cable that comes with this drive. As this drive is intended to be connected to Notebook computers, there’s no need for the 1m+ long cables that some drive manufacturers insist on including with their drives, the included 45cm cable is more than long enough, I actually wouldn’t mind it even shorter.
In Operation:
Like any USB drive that ever was and ever will be, using the Passport Elite is as easy as using your standard internal hard drive, it appears in My Computer and away you go. The speed was good as expected, giving an honest 30MB/s transfer speed, very similar to the slightly older Western Digital My Book Passport drive we looked at here. And just like with the older Passport drive, when using the backup software with encryption enabled, performance does suffer a little bit, but it’s still more than acceptable.
