X-bit labs

Western Digital Passport Mobile Hard Disk Drive with 250GB Storage Capacity

Category: Storage

by Aleksey Meyev

[ 09/05/2007 | 02:31 PM ]

We would like to introduce to you a new external hard disk drive from Western Digital built on 2.5-inch HDD and featuring the today’s largest storage capacity for a solution of this kind. It supports USB interface and offers unprecedented performance – a significant step forward compared with its 120GB predecessors we reviewed before.

Table of contents:

• Closer Look
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in Intel IOMeter
  
• Sequential Read & Write
  
• Database Pattern
  
• Fireserver and Webserver Patterns
  
• Workstation Pattern
  
• Multi-Threaded Read & Write Patterns
  
• Performance in WinBench 99
  
• Performance in FC-Test
  
• Conclusion
  

A hard disk drive cannot be too big. Very often we get to the point when we start thinking of getting a new storage solution, because the old one can no longer fit all the data that we need for comfortable living.

Those who care most about mobility of their huge data volumes with immediate access to information at any time, need to pay special attention to the storage capacity of their hard disk drives. One of the options for those who need a portable solution with large storage capacity is the product we are going to talk about today: Western Digital Passport WD2500U017 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.

Closer Look

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.

Unfortunately, this rich design will not please you for long: the glossy surface catches scratches very easily, not to mention the oily fingerprints that will stick to it every time you touch the drive.

USB-connector on one of the sides is locked tightly with a rubber plug that is attached to the casing. This convenient and practical design ensures that the rubber plug won’t get lost. It also protects the connectors from dust.

Inside the storage device there is a WD2500BEVS hard disk drive. It is damped with rubber pads (four of them – the black squares on four corners of the HDD – are shown on the photo above). There is also an electronic PCB and an internal connector that are covered with protective foil screen.

The HDD power consumption arouses some questions. The sticker says that it is 0.55A, plus the IDE-USB adapter electronics consumes some power as well, so assume the HDD requires up to 0.6A. At the same time, the specification claim that a single USB-port workload shouldn’t exceed 0.5A, so WD Passport may experience some power consumption problems. It is especially acute for notebook owners, as the notebook USB ports sometimes cannot feed even USB devices requiring 0.4-0.5A.