Western Digital Passport 40 GB Portable HDD

Recently, lots of players have entered the portable hard drive market in India. This not only includes the heavy, bulky and not-so-portable 200 GB+

external drives, but also the light, compact and portable drives with capacities ranging from 5 to 40 GB. 

The advantage of the portable drives is that they provide much more capacity than the old-fashioned USB pen drives and at the same time offer a far lower cost per GB. They can be used to instantly store and carry around all your business files, music and videos.

The Western Digital Passport is one such drive that we reviewed. The one we reviewed had 40 GB capacity and a spindle speed of 5400 RPM. It's fairly easy to use, lightweight and even comes with a shock-absorbing casing to protect it while being carried around. The drive gets its power directly from the USB port, but nevertheless has an external power supply option in case you have an older USB port that isn't self-powered. 

We tested the drive on a system with P4 3 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, Windows XP with SP1. We compared this Western Digital Portable hard disk with the Iomega and Transcend drives, reviewed in December last year. It performed much better than both these drives. 

In access time, this Western Digital left the Iomega behind by 1.3 ms and

Transcend by 2 ms. Even in Business Disk Winmark, it outperformed Iomega by a margin of 11% and Transcend by 49.5%.

Bottom Line: The best part about the WD passport is that you can get it for a modest price of Rs 6,400. 



This is much lower than Iomega, which is now priced at Rs 8950 and Transcend that you can purchase for Rs 7300+VAT. 


Given the strong performance, decent price, light weight and portability, this portable Western Digital drive is definitely worth a buy.

Ankit Kawatra