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^^ it also comes with a nice sleeve. it's truly the thinnest and smallest portable drive out there. i've been using it everyday since i got it a few months ago and it's been performing great.one thing to keep in mind though, is that it comes with 2 usb connectors to pc in case extra power is needed, but it also seems to work okay by connecting just one.
Basically, it's a laptop hard disk with an external enclosure, however it is very sturdy and doesn't feel flimsy at all. This is because manufacturers use decimal measurements of bytes and computers use binary measurements.
But for those who are concerned about capacity, I might recommend the 500GB model. Personally, 20GB less doesn't matter to me.
I've only had this drive for about 5 hours and already I love it. One thing to note, it's advertised at 320GB capacity although, the real amount is close to 300GB.
Otherwise, this was a great purchase. It's small, sleek, and fast.
The device can be used with a regular USB cable but, for optimized performance the dual USB cable that is included should be used.
Of note, I have NEVER had LINUX fail to boot due to a software error, but for affordable, cutting edge image and video editing Windows is the only game in town.Last week I was trying to finish an important presentation for a scientific meeting. No Joy.Well, the heck with it. I had, at most, ten hours to finish it up. To sort out the failed boot will take anywhere from 30 min to 8 hours, to a complete Windows reinstall, and I do NOT have the time (Fixed now, and it took just over an hour to sort it).Fortunately for the past 8 months or so I have been using this portable disk WD320 drive as my main work drive, backing it up to the system RAID-0 at the end of each work session. .
The near failure of the WD320 pointed out the need for another easily accessible - thus external - backup drive for the computer. If I had, once again, a Windows failure would have taken precious time from the little that I had left.This series of events has also prompted me to get, yet another large, external drive for backup of the backups of the internal drives. My older computers all have these, but I was relying upon the RAID-0 on this computer to obviate that need. Tried, failed, again, then went with the F8 "pick your poison" boot key.
Choose "last known good". causing you to miss a deadline, waste time, or lose data.If you are in the 89.37% of the computing world that uses MS-Windows (1) that element would be the operating system.Over the decades, I have had power-supplies, mother boards, memory sticks, disk drives, disk controllers, CPUs and other hardware elements all fail at inopportune times. Hoping for the best, I used the USB cord from my previous WD160 drive, which fixed the problem.The point of all this is that the existence of large capacity, quite fast (I use the WD320 for video editing) portable external USB drives has changed how I use my computer. All of the files for the presentation, and the presentation itself were on the portable drive, essentially only the backups were on the failed computer.So, I simply started my main backup desktop (I have two others) and plugged my Wonderful WD320 into it expecting to get right back to work on the presentation. Now what. Cannot access the disks on the failed computer - unless I open it and remove them to another machine.
The actual work drive, with all the live data files, is the portable external. Hung booting in safe-mode.
I do not rely upon internal drives for the storage of my current projects. Indeed, I am thinking that my next computer will have only a system drive, and a scratch drive internally, all other drives will be external.If you value your data and your time buy this WD320 - but use it as your main data drive, and use the computer's internal drives as backup, instead of the other way around.[.].
The internal drives on the computer are used for storage of completed work, backups of current projects, unimportant current projects, scratch disks, index disks, system and program disks. But the single most common failure that I have is that of the MS-Windows operating system.
Sadly, the drive immediately started acting flakey - triggering, and retriggering, the "found new hardware daemon." It is never just one thing. Great.
Booting my 2 month old quad-core, 4 GB RAM, 6 TB of storage, dual video-card monster it hung on the Windows-XP splash screen - though it had been fine that very morning, and I had installed nothing in the interval. Will boot safe-mode and roll back to a couple of days ago (just to be safe).
Higly recommended. I managed to back up all my information from my PC laptop onto the External HD with expediency and to organize it through my mac laptop with similar ease.A great product for anybody who seeks a convinient and small external HD. What impresses me the most about this usb powered external portable hard drive was of course its small size (about the size of an 120 GB ipod). Despite the fact that it is dwarfed in comparison to other such tool of its kind, it is nontheless capable of harboring up to 320 GB of data and smoothly operating on both mac and pc with minimun transition time.
I have been let down though. You can't get it to work at all. Even when it does recognize it, there are frequent warnings that pop up saying the device has been removed unsafely. This is just an internal Western Digital drive with a case. Sounds like a loose connection. The other just simply doesn't show it. What a bummer, I loved the small size.
My work laptop (Win 2000) recognizes it fine. It only recognizes the device in some machines. I think the problem is actually the USB connector, but am not positive. Our Vista laptop gives error messages. It's junk.
It is as small as possible which is why I got it. Jan 22, 2009 update:I have to send this back. One says it can't find the software for the external device. It isn't recognized on 3 of the 4 computers I've used so far. We have 2 XP desktops.
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