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Full Review

A portable hard disk whose performance and features aren’t bad for its price and the space it offers. That’s the Passport 320 Essential (model number WD3200MEB-00) for you. The pleasingly designed compact casing has a blue-colored smooth finish, with four soft-pads at the bottom for support (the rounded edges mean it can’t stand vertically). As would happen with any smooth casing, it does attract scratches, and fingerprints rather easily. The drive has a white glowing light right beside the mini-USB 2.0 port, to indicate that it is plugged in, and to indicate drive activity.

It comes with WD Sync software already placed on the drive, for synchronization of your personal files and 128-bit encryption.

The My Passport Essential comes with WD Sync software already placed on the drive (no separate CD), for synchronization of your personal files and 128-bit encryption. That way, you can automate backups and forget about having to copy files manually. This application is compatible with Windows XP and Vista. The drive autoruns its software (WD Sync), which could be annoying if you don’t want to use it. Fortunately, the simple solution is to copy away the portable drive’s software to your hard-disk, and delete them from the portable drive.

In synthetic benchmarks, the Passport Essential 320GB gave a read speed average of 31 MB/s and write speed average of 30.4 MB/s. The read access time averaged 17.66 milliseconds. Real-world write tests consisted of copying a number of small files (1.81 GB , 31 files of varying sizes), and one single large file (over 2 GB in size), from a fast desktop hard drive to the portable drive under testing. Speeds here averaged 24 MB/s and 31 MB/s respectively. Real-world read speed (copying multiple files from portable drive to desktop HDD) stood at 31 MB/s. It uses a fast ‘Scorpio’ class 2.5” hard drive from WD, spinning at 5400rpm with 8 MB of cache; and is light at just 180 grams. It is quiet and does not heat up much in operation. The drive spins down when inactive, to conserve power. Some older PCs and laptops have USB ports that supply less power; in such cases you might need to buy what’s called a Y-cable to draw power from two USB ports, since this drive comes with only a single 45cm USB cable. The Passport Essential is priced in line with its segment, and Western Digital offers a five year warranty on this drive.

Bottom Line

Well designed with smooth curves. Is widely available in retail and offers a choice of nine colors. Internally, it uses a performance oriented WD Scorpio hard disk drive.