Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive (Bronze)

by Western Digital

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.5 x 1.8 inches ; 11.8 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0015YGNQU
• California residents: Click here for Proposition 65 warning.
• Item model number: WDMLZ3200TN
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 22, 2003

Product Description

Western Digital Passport Elite 320GB Portable USB Drive-Bronze

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very small, very light, totally silent, reliable 320 gb, May 3, 2008

By 

K. Ambrose (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive (Bronze) (Personal Computers)

Smallest, lightest, virtually silent drive I've ever used. In comparson to a deck of cards, this drive is sightly longer, about the same width, somewhat heavier.

I lke it a lot, in fact I just bought a second one, and will be dumping 3 or 4 of my 100-200 gb annoyingly large, heavy, hot, and loud external drives.

This drive works great, BUT only after I connected it to my laptop using an externaly powered accessory USB hub. I strongly recommend this type of connection for external drives, USB/CD burners, etc. The power coming from one USP port of my IBM-T42 simply did not provide adequate power to the drive, and my laptop WOULD NOT RECOGNIZE the drive when I connected with the supplied cable. This is a common problem for external devices such as drives and burners. Many computers, especially laptops, have very limited power available from a single USB port.

I installed the included backup software but then disabled it. The backup software can be set to "syncronize" folders you pick so that two or more folders on different drives will have the same contents. This works but is not the type of back up strategy I use. I backup the whole drive, windows and all, to make disaster recovery a "one step" job.

I wanted to use the included encryption software but apparently this is a "pay-extra" software and I couldn't install it.

So I am now using an open source encryption tool called "true-crypt", which I highly recommend. Don't forget your password however, there is no "back door" once you've encrypted your data!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Complaints, 5 Stars!, June 18, 2008

By 

J. Roubique "mkat_tdc" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive (Bronze) (Personal Computers)

Bought on 6/17. Amazon was $199 on 6/16 so I bought at B-Buy for $159 on 6/17. Came home and it was $137 on Amazon. Oh well...

This exHD is awesome.

I love the bronze color and the size is perfect; literally the size of 2 passports stacked on top of each other. The white LEDs give it a professional look more than a neon geek color :-B Price per GB is spot on. I paid .50 cents per GB, but its obviously less now. Sure you can buy a plastic S*mpleTech for less per GB, but you can also get the exact same problems every negative review had about them. No problems here.

I followed another review of another Passport exHD and plugged it into my iMac (OSX 10.5.2 Intel 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo). Apple's Time Machine or something came on instantly and asked if I wanted to use it as a back-up. I closed it and went into the Disk Utility under Applications>Utilities. From there I made it a journaled disk from the drop down menu. From there it shows up initially labeled My Passport. I used the first menu to verify the exHD. After that, I went to erase as I did not want to ATTEMPT to foil with any proprietary software. I chose Mac OSX Extended (Journaled) and named it My Passport again (because I'm so proud of it). This deleted any software that *might have been on it. As soon as it was formatted I moved the files that were bogging down my poor iMac HD and then I opened Time Machine and used the Passport as my source for all my necessary files to be backed up. Works great.

5 Stars for

1. Price

2. Size

3. Style

4. Function

5. No Complaints

If I need more space, I'll be buying the exact same drive again. /Maybe in

titanium for organizational purposes/

Hope this was helpful for Mac community :)

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Cheap finish, average performance, great portability., August 18, 2008

By 

Dreams of tomorrow - See all my reviews

This review is from: Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive (Bronze) (Personal Computers)

Overall, I like this hardrive. It is small and light, fits perfectly in my bag. Compared to the essential version, I would expect a better finish. It's still plastic, though matte and not as easily scratchable. The drive gets really warm after just a few minutes of use. The transfer is slow, at around 10 mb/s but that's what you would expect from a usb device.

Despite the fact that I like it, I would not buy it the second time.