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There are many things that you have to take in to account when purchasing an external hard drive. We like to make it a bit simpler here, and instead of going through the technical specifications of each drive in detail, we like to tell you how it is. First of all, this is by far the most portable drive that we have found. If you are looking for something that you want to take with you on a regular basis because you need to move data between two or more computers, this is most likely what you are looking for. It doesn’t really get more ultra portable than this!
When it comes to usability, and ease of use, it is top of the line. The reasonable 1TB size is more than enough for a drive of this size. We were surprised at how small it really was – the pictures don’t do justice! In the photo above you can see the drive fitting easily in your hand, and you don’t really realie that before you give it a try. Thanks to the small size, this is a perfect ultra portable external hard drive for a laptop – you can easily fit it in your laptop case. Even if you don’t have a large case with lots of pockets, the thin 0.7 inch design allows you to strap it in the same pocket as your laptop.
Many people often are concerned whether an external hard drive will work with their operating system. This one works with Windows and Mac OS X according to the manufacturer, and according to the testing we have done, this is true. Also if you have any experience with external disks, you will easily get it working with your Linux distribution (with Ubuntu this is very easy). Most of the time all the portable and external disks work with the majority of operating systems, it is that the manufacturer or distributor does not guarantee this, and that you will usually have to format the drive to match the file system that is supported by your operating system. Unix distributions are generally very flexible with this and Windows often is very limited when it comes to supporting anything else than FAT32 or NTFS.
Some of the interesting features that we found from this product was the hardware encryption which provide you even further security for your files. You can feel free to transfer sensitive material using this drive thanks to the enhanced safety. Thanks to the extremely small size you can keep it with you at all times and when you need to transfer data, just plug it to the computer where you need to get the files from. Basically it can be used as a flash drive with a lot of capacity. The dual USB 3.0 and 2.0 enables you to transfer files extra fast – this means you are able to transfer files between your computer and your hard drive as fast as 5 gB/s which is a whopping ten fold increase when it comes to just a single channel USB 2.0, just not quite yet. It will take some time before this technology will be completely supported.
Size – very small!
If you are looking for a very small and portable hard drive, you are looking at the product for you. You don’t have to wear baggy jeans to be able to fit this in your pocket and make sure that it goes everywhere with you! Perhaps you are going to a party and you want to take your music collection with you as no-one else seems to have all those great songs as you have. Just use this Ultra Portable Western Digital My Passport to carry the files with you. It comes in a 750gB and 1TB size which doesn’t affect the physical size of the product.
Thanks to the glossy cool finish that it has, it doesn’t really look like you are carrying a hard drive with you. If you are old school, you most likely remember the sizes of hard drives just a few decades ago – it can be hard to understand that this one packs 100 times more data and is about a fifth of the size.
Speed?
USB 3.0. 10 times faster than USB 2.0. Nuff said? We did some testing. Depending on the location of the data (inner disc or outer region) the speeds will vary from 45MB/s to 85MB/s which is quite a normal difference, but since the whole drive is small, the disk has a smaller diameter so there isn’t as large difference between the inner and outer regions as there could be. When tranferring files, writing and reading, we found that it is about three times faster when using USB 3.0 when compared to USB 2.0.
Software
This ultra portable hard drive by Western Digital comes with software which enables two things. The hardware encryption which is especially important if you want to encrypt your files. If you are transferring sensitive business information or if you don’t want your photos to get in to the wrong hands, it is what you need.
The software also enables automatic backups for your computer – this is a very useful feature. Most of the time you think that your computer is just fine until the internal hard drive crashes. You lose all your data! Don’t let this happen. It’s easy to avoid the additional hassle by taking daily automatic backups of your files and your work.
Conclusion
This is by far the best small sized external hard drive we have ever tested or come accross. Why is this? Two things. It is physically the smallest one we could find which wasn’t SSD. Also it works the best. It is fastest with smallest seek times and very fast transfer with USB 3.0.