Replaced a very old 400GB external full size desktop external drive
Posted in Use by Manyu Monday, August 15th, 2011
I was looking to replace a very old 400GB external full size desktop (3.5″) external drive. I’ve always been a fan of WD hard drives, and a few friends have various WD Passport models, which I liked. They’re surprisingly small, especially for holding 1TB, making them very portable, and they run off of USB bus power (depending on the power output of your USB ports, which is mostly nice, however since it takes a few seconds to initialize, my BIOS waits for the USB drive to see what it is, and doesn’t provide a way to bypass that, so it can add 15-30 seconds to your boot time if you leave it plugged in all the time (which I do as a backup drive).
The software is useless for anything above very basic usage, as it has no sort of customization whatsoever. Solid build quality. Works fast on USB 2.0. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything that supports USB 3.0 yet, but it’s nice to know it supports it for the future.
As long as you’re not counting on the software (there’s many better and free encryption, monitoring, and backup tools out there anyway) and don’t need something with its own power source, it’s one of the best external drives out there.
I’ve been trying to sync my laptop to create a backup. It makes my computer hang. Then I tried copying and pasting the files. When copying Gigabytes of file, it again becomes unresponsive at some point, having to restart m computer. Can be computer, but i didn’t have problem copying files to another Omega portable HDD that i use. Not completely satisfied with perormance but it is a nice size with USB 3.0 capability. It’s ok!
Disadvantages:
1. Takes too long to backup the disk using USB2
2. Not intuitive
3. Support: (i) Marginal support quality, (ii) available for free for 30 days only
4. When not running a backup the program frequently uses more than 50% of CPU time
5. Operating system files are not backed up
Advatages: small size, powered off the USB port
Suggestions to buyers:
1. Select a driver with faster interface – USB3 is not available in old laptops
