| Article Index |
|---|
| Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB Review |
| 2 - Features |
| 3 - Installation/Operation |
| 4 - Conclusion |
| All Pages |
Today we’re having a look at the latest portable hard drive from Western Digital
to hit the market, the My Passport Elite 320GB. A brilliant looking, stylish drive with plenty to offer, we take a closer look.
The My Passport Elite is not Western Digital’s cheap and cheerful portable drive (not that there’s anything wrong with cheap and cheerful mind you) like their more basic My Passport Essential range, but rather the Elite range is for people after something a little better than standard, both better looking and better features. The 320GB version retails online for around AU$250.00, about $20 more than the My Passport Essential drive of the same capacity.
Appearance:
The My Passport Elite differs from its Passport Essential brethren in a few areas, firstly, the design of the drive case is essentially the same, but the Elite drives are painted in either a Titanium or a Bronze colour scheme with a soft matt finish, instead of the glossy and more vibrant colours of the Essential range, which gives the Elite drives are more professional appearance. Blue and Red will be available shortly though for those wanting a bit more of a lively colour scheme.
The actual design of the My Passport gets its style queues from its full size desktop counterparts, the My Book’s, basically they’re all made to imitate, at least partially, the look of a book (!). The My Book range is big, bulky and actually needs a bookshelf to support it, whereas the My Passport drives are sleek and small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, or travel in your back pocket without making you look weird.
Features and Software:
“So what? It looks nice?! I don’t care about that I just want a good portable drive” you may say, and fair enough, looks aren’t everything and never judge a book by its cover etc. etc. all the things your Mum used to tell you as a kid. And she was right, so what else does the Elite range have to offer?
Well at the base of the drive next to the USB connector there is a row of 4-LED lights, these act as both activity lights and a capacity usage meter. When the drive is in use/transferring data they dance from side to side, and when it’s not, the lights are stationary lighting up the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th LED’s to tell you (roughly) how much space you’ve used. A cool feature so you can instantly know if you have enough free space by simply looking at the drive and not having to investigate through My Computer.
The included software package is another difference between the Elite and Essential range, with the Elite drives including Automatic backup software, so you can schedule your backups, or have it backup essential files whenever you plug the drive in your computer. Normally this is only included in Western Digital’s desktop range of drives (My Book’s), so to have it included in a portable drive is a welcome feature. Considering the size these portable drives are now getting up to, they’re starting to become more and more useful as a complete backup solution.
Another software feature the Passport’s have, is the inclusion of remote access software, so you can leave this drive connected and home and access its contents from any computer in the world, so long as you have an internet connection. But come on, the drive is so small that if you were travelling you’d just take it with you in the first place. Alas the included software doesn’t only work with the Western Digital drive, you can use it to access any data on any drive connected to your system, remotely, so it’s quite a neat and handy bit of software.
Value:
In a previous review of a Western Digital portable drive, the original ‘My Book Passport’ the thing we were most impressed with was the great value of the drive. It gave us a 250GB drive for less than you could buy a notebook hard drive and USB case, all in one neat package. This new drive, while it’s certainly not overpriced compared to its competitors, it just doesn’t offer the same deal. It’s about $70 more expensive than a bare 320GB notebook drive, so if you’re after very basic portable storage, a bare drive and USB case would be cheaper, but then again it wouldn’t look as good or have any of the software included with it, so it becomes a difficult choice between features and value.
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.
Conclusion:
The Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB is an excellent portable drive, it’s stylish, available in a range of colours (currently only Titanium and Bronze, black and red coming soon), and for basic operation it’s is as easy to use as any other USB drive on the market, real plug and play.
It is slightly more expensive than it’s “Essential” counterpart, however if you make use of the included backup software and MioNet remote access software, then $20 more is not a whole lot extra for the added functionality. Both the Elite and Essential range come with a 5 Year warranty for piece of mind.
Be aware that some computers may require a USB cable with an additional USB connector to draw extra power for the drive, this type of cable is often included with external USB drives and cases, but not so with this drive. With that in mind it still worked just fine on a single port on my LG notebook, but it’s just something to keep in mind.
Overall a great drive that I would highly recommend, and if you don’t need the additional software included, you can save yourself $20 and buy basically the same drive in the Western Digital Passport Essential range.
OzHardware Rating – 9.5/10 – Excellent!
This product can be purchased online at www.techbuy.com.au ( Direct Link)
