Western Digital Passport Review:
The Western Digital Passport has been Western Digital’s most successful line of portable external hard drives for several years. The sleek casing, solid build quality, reasonable speed and tons of storage space continue to keep these USB-powered 2.5″ 5400RPM SATA notebook hard drives popular. The all new Western Digital Passport series offers even greater capacities, improved indicator lights, simple port protection, and some nice software to keep your portable storage organized.

The Western Digital Passport is based on a 2.5in notebook hard drive that uses a single USB connection for power and data connection. By doing away with a mains power adapter, these drives are small enough to be slipped into a jacket pocket or a small bag and taken with you anywhere. The Western Digital Passport is available in 60GB, 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, and 250GB versions so there’s plenty of options if you’re on a tight budget.

Western Digital Passport that offers 250GB of storage space and is built with a 2.5-inch hard disk drive. It is true: perpendicular recording technology does work wonders: about half a year ago the maximum storage capacity of portable hard disk drives of this form-factor was almost half the size. Moreover, this storage capacity is quite enough even for a desktop 3.5” HDD these days.

External Western Digital Passport hard disk drives can hardly be confused with the competitors’ solutions: the black glossy casing standing out through the transparent plastic casing catches your eye right away.

Western Digital clearly has its finger on the design pulse as the Western Digital Passport is one superb looking device. The glossy black top surface looks as good as ever - piano black certainly seems to be the flavour of the day with Samsung’s current line-up of notebooks and the majority of new TVs also sporting this finish - and the matt finish of the bottom creates a perfect contrast. No matter what the fashion industry tries to tell us, nothing will ever truly be the new black.

The perfect shininess of the top is only interrupted by a subtle etched WD logo in its centre and a small blue ring on one of the sides. When the drive is powered up the ring glows a deep shade of blue and flashes a lighter brighter shade as the drive is accessed. Stylish and subtle seems to be the aim of the game and the Western Digital Passport is playing a blinder.

Hidden away behind a rather oversized rubber flap, the USB connection is of the mini variety that are a standard for this type of device, so if you do lose the supplied cable you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a replacement. The use of a protective cover for the USB socket helps to prevent dust ingress and provides an extra level of splash protection should you knock your coffee over or drop your orange juice. However, be under no illusion, the Passport is not what you would call water proof. Nor indeed does it strike me as rugged. One short drop could prehaps prove disasterous.

Piano black seems to be all the rage these days, and the fingerprint magnetised surface consumes the top half of the drive, the other half treated to a matte finish. A single blue, LED lit circle lets you know that you’ve plugged it in through the USB 2.0 connection, which also powers the drive.

Unlike Seagate who includes the portable Ceedo software suite with its FreeAgent Go series of drives, Western Digital only includes WDSync, a synchronisation tool for easy back up of email, files and bookmarks.

A three year limited warranty is available for the drive, so you can haul it from place to place with (near) reckless abandon. The Western Digital Passport’s casing however is nowhere near as solid as Seagate’s FreeAgent Go, so if you’re more concerned about ruggedness than capacity, the Seagate may be a better bet.

As a larger capacity drive the latest Passport also outperformed its nearest rival, the Seagate FreeAgent Go 160GB, returning a decent sustained transfer rate that should mean streaming DVD resolution movies off it shouldn’t be a problem.

If you’re consistently moving large amounts of data between places and burning DVDs is starting to get your goat, you could do a lot worse than picking up one of these incredibly useful devices.

Buy Western Digital Passport