Western Digital 250GB Passport
The 250 GB “Passport” from Western Digital is a fantastic external hard drive.
With such a sleek design, the Passport is definitely not an eye-sore. It’s amazing how lightweight the device and small is the device.
Power – The Passport is powered through its USB connection to your computer. Meaning, you don’t need an extra power plug. This feature truly makes the device a portable external hard drive.
Small Drive – It’s amazing that 250 gigabytes can fit on a device so small, but it does. An added bonus from some retailers is that the hard drive comes with a soft, padded black case (which is the case I purchased and love).
Hard Drive Installation – On my laptop, it was plug and play. I love it when I don’t have to install any software for devices I plug into my computer. However, you can run an installer included on the hard drive that will help your synchronize your data and encrypt it to the drive. I usually dislike having to install any additional software, however, since this device is so portable and will probably travel with me, I want my data that is stored on the hard drive to be encrypted. The sync software runs off of the drive itself, so you don’t even have to worry.
Synchronizing & Encrypting Data – Once you run the sync software and create a user name and password, you’re data that you sync will be encrypted to the drive.
The sync opens once you’ve entered your password and copies over your files.
Once your files have been synchronized, you can close the application or view your files through the file viewer.
If you access the drive directly, there is a folder called “WD Sync Data” that has your encrypted data, if you open the folder you can see that the files are stored in folders with letters and don’t make much sense (this is because they’ve been encrypted). If you want to save files directly to the drive without encrypting them, you can do so as well.
File System – The hard drive comes formatted with the FAT32 file system which is more compatible across operating systems but does have limitations as far as maximum file size for a single file (it’s huge about 4GB, but if you’re storing movies, you can try NTFS). I decided to format my drive to NTFS which provides better security, larger file size, and supposedly is more stable. To format the drive as NTFS, I right-clicked on the drive and selected format (This step erases the data on the drive, just FYI, so copy over any existing data you want to keep before formatting. The step also will take a few hours).
After using the drive for hours and hours, it still stays relatively cool. You can feel the hard-drive whirl when holding the drive, but other than that, the drive is very quiet.
With its sleek, glossy design, portability, and ease of use, the Western Digital Passport 
