WD Passport Portable WDXMS1200 120 GB

A few months before Christmas my laptop decided to be an utter git and my hard drive crashed. I lost hundreds of photo's, my whole itunes library and two years worth of uni work. After getting a new hard drive fitted I laboriously set about uploading all my music onto it and pleading with itunes to let me download all my purchased music (all £150 worth) again for free, managed to find some old back up copies of photo's and work as well. All was not ...
...the benefits of backing things up on your computer and so I decided rather than buy hundreds of discs I would invest in a very shiny new external hard drive……

Price

I was looking to buy just a 60 GB hard drive but after looking around a bit I found that I could buy 120 GB Western Digital hard drive for exactly the same price as a 60 GB, so logically I bought the 120 GB one for just under £80. Considering the price I ... more

A few months before Christmas my laptop decided to be an utter git and my hard drive crashed. I lost hundreds of photo's, my whole itunes library and two years worth of uni work. After getting a new hard drive fitted I laboriously set about uploading all my music onto it and pleading with itunes to let me download all my purchased music (all £150 worth) again for free, managed to find some old back up copies of photo's and work as well. All was not lost. However this little catastrophe did open my eyes to the benefits of backing things up on your computer and so I decided rather than buy hundreds of discs I would invest in a very shiny new external hard drive……

Price

I was looking to buy just a 60 GB hard drive but after looking around a bit I found that I could buy 120 GB Western Digital hard drive for exactly the same price as a 60 GB, so logically I bought the 120 GB one for just under £80. Considering the price I could have got more storage for less money but decided that it was worth paying a little extra to have a smaller hard drive as opposed to paying say £60 and having a great whopping tower drive to cart around. For a similar price to the hard drive I purchased you could buy a 250 GB drive however they are much bulkier.

Size

Measurements:
Approx: 15mm high, 129mm long, 79mm wide and weighs around 0.1048 kg.

If you like me and that doesn't mean an awful lost to you, it's incredibly light….we are talking perhaps slightly lighter that your average paper back book. In terms of size it really is the size of a passport in length and width and fits nicely into your hand. Not to mention the fact it has a nice glossy finish on it and is just generally quite pretty.

Storage Capacity

120 GB is a fair bit. I have my whole itunes library on there plus backup copies of pretty much my whole computer including photo's etc… and there is still tonnes of room on it. The official specs say that it will hold up to 71 hours of DVD quality video, 40,000 mp3 songs, 45,000 digital photo's and so on….basically it holds an awful lot of stuff on it.

Connection

Really very simple….USB. It comes with a cable, which is a bit short so the drive needs to be close to the computer, it doesn't need any extra power supply or anything like that either, which does however mean you have to be careful if your using it while you computer is running of battery power because obviously it will run out faster.

Speed

Quite fast, but if you want to be technical it has an average seek time of 2 ms. In my experience as soon as a plug it in its pretty much ready to go…no long waiting period while it makes funny noises or anything like that.

I think this is a really great buy for anyone who wants some extra storage space for their computer, and even better for people who want to take the whole contents of their computer wherever they go. It small, light, fast and easy to use, there are no complicated setting up procedures and is pretty much idiot proof. It's an especially good buy for anyone who has any concerns about the integrity of the hard drive in their laptop….
 

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