When I needed a bigger better backup solution for about 120 gigabytes of photo, video, and Web design data, I finally decided on the Western Digital Passport 320 GB USB drive. It offered a great combination of speed, size, convenience, and price. I purchased the drive through an online retailer for $165.99, just over 50 cents per megabyte. The drive did not function properly upon receipt, but I was able to resolve the problem, and the drive turned out to be a great answer for my backup needs.

I wanted to perform my backups using simple copy utilities, with no compression. Compression introduces an additional opportunity for error, and this is, after all, my primary backup. The only compressed exception will be an Acronis True Image backup of my system drive. I also have a couple of smaller drives to back up from my wife’s computer. Since I’m not backing everything up (no programs, etc., just data and settings) the 320 GB on this drive should be adequate for a couple of copies of each set, yielding some backup redundancy.

The drive itself it tiny. It’s a slick black rectangle about 5” x 2 3/4” x 5/8”, as pictured above. It has a couple of swoopy sides, mainly for aesthetics. Under a rubber flap on one end is the only port you need: a single USB port. It is a tiny package for the 320 GB that it holds. The drive itself is a 2.5” laptop drive. Power comes from the USB cable connection to the computer. No drivers necessary, just plug it in and go. Well, that was the idea. It proved more difficult in practice.

The problems started almost immediately. The drive came formatted for FAT32. I needed NTSF. So I plugged the drive into a system USB port, but the operating system would not recognize it, though it is supposed to be Plug ‘n Play. Finally, through a combination of re-boots and USB cable insertion, the drive was finally recognized. It took several attempts, using the Windows disk management utility, to get a correct NTSF format on the drive. Along the way, I received a variety of messages including “format failed,” “drive not found,” “cannot write to drive”, etc.

Even though the drive finally took a proper NTSF format, when I tried to copy files to it, there were so many bad sectors that every attempt to copy several gigabytes of data to the drive failed, often  requiring that I start totally over. After several frustrating hours, I gave up for the first day, with a strong feeling that the drive was fine and that something about my hardware or operating system that was causing such a variety errors.

The next day, I re-formatted the drive and looked at it with the Western Digital WinDlg utility, which I downloaded from their website. Their simple SMART test passed, but the actual surface test quickly failed due to an excess of bad sectors. So I ran the windows version of checkdisk on the drive, asking it to fix any errors found. That ran for a long time. This is a BIG drive. Then I ran the WinDlg extended test again, and it passed. In the interim, the drive lost about 30 megabytes of space, which were apparently bad sectors removed from service.

After the test, it took two reboots to get the system to recognize the drive, even using the system off, plug in drive, system on process. Plugging it in hot just did not work. Then I tried again to copy the contents of a drive containing about 24 gigabytes of data. About 2/3 of the way through this copy process, an error message flashed up quicker than I could read it and the copy was aborted. When I tried to delete the files that were left on the drive, several could not be deleted because they were corrupt. This, of course, required that I run chkdisk with the Fix option. I was then able to delete the corrupted files.

Next, I tried the Passport on my laptop, which is a pretty respectable two-year-old Toshiba Satellite,  running XP Pro. The laptop did manage to recognize and run the Passport without having to reboot. That’s a plus, and probably points to some kind of an issue with my desktop machine, although it has recognized and used every other USB device that I have plugged into it, including several different printers, several different cameras, my cell phone, and several USB flash drives. I’m not sure what makes the Passport different. I do know that it also failed to write properly when attached to the laptop. It copied about 60 percent of 30 gigabytes of data, then errored out because of a bad sector, just as it had on the desktop machine.

The errors that I had been getting did not seem consistent, nor did the comparison between Western Digital and Windows utilities. So I got out my trusty multimeter. Voila! Problem solved! Neither of the two computers on which I was testing this drive were putting out enough voltage to the USB cable. The desktop is home-built, based on a good Asus motherboard and a good power supply, but anything is possible. It is also five years old. But the two-year-old Toshiba is a surprise. Both were about 15 percent low. That is apparently enough to cause significant errors.

My answer was fairly simple. A quick trip to Office Depot netted me a Belkin powered USB hub. I probably overpaid for it, and I bought it with almost no research other than reading boxes in the store, but it did the trick. Its voltage readings are both exact and steady and it has made the drive a happy camper. It now writes flawlessly at a rate of about half a gigabyte per minute. I have moved about 130 gigs of data in the post-Belkin mode without error.

I have a feeling that the low voltage levels I was experiencing are not uncommon, especially given that the Toshiba was so low. It might save Western Digital a lot of trouble if they would put a circuit into the controller to read the voltage, and a bit of error code in the firmware to tell the user that their voltage is insufficient. It would have saved me two days work, and might save Western Digital a lot of RMA returns. Despite all the bother, I’m happy with the Western Digital Passport USB drive. I am not thrilled to have to carry a powered hub around with it, but that not WD’s fault. Now that I have figured out the problem, it does pretty much what I wanted it to do. I’ll give the hardware five stars.

By the way, I wrote a detailed email to Western Digital support on the day I started having problems. I finally received a reply six days later. Annoyingly enough, the first thing it said was that they would consider the case closed if the didn’t hear back from me about their boiler-plate suggestions within four days, two days less than it took them to answer me. If you think you might need actual support for your USB drive, both quick and free, this may not be the drive for you. I have to give Western Digital’s “customer support” no stars at all.

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Entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm under Reviews, Storage, Tips and advice.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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