Product Reviews

If you want to carry about documents, music and pictures wherever you go, you could buy a USB Flash memory drive. But even the largest USB Flash memory drives hold little more than one or two gigabytes of data. You'll soon find yourself running out of room, especially if movies, music and photos are part of the deal.

The good news is that for not much more than the price of a 1GB USB Flash memory drive you could buy an external hard disk like Western Digital's Passport, and use it to back up important data, and ferry files between computers quickly and easily.

The Passport is an external hard disk that plugs into a spare USB 2 port using the supplied cable. A natty blue light is then lit-up on its side. Windows

ADVERTISEMENT

recognises the drive as a generic storage device, and you can set about dragging and dropping files onto it with gay abandon. With 80GB of storage space, there's plenty of room for all but the most obsessive of file hoarders.

It's not much use having all that storage space, though, if it takes ages to get files on and off the drive. Fortunately, the Western Digital is no slouch. It's no speed demon either - but a read speed of 17MB/s and a write speed of 19MB/s are quite acceptable for a USB 2 hard disk.

External hard disks must be sturdy creatures and, thankfully, the Passport's silver and blue exterior not only looks snazzy, but feels solid, well-built and well up to withstanding a few knocks and shocks on the move.

The Western Digital isn't the only external drive available, though. Spending just a little more cash could get you a 160GB drive such as the excellent Freecom FHD-3. If you have a desktop computer, the LaCie d2 SATA 160GB offers vastly better performance, but it does require you to install external Serial-ATA ports on your PC, so it's not as straightforward to use as a USB 2 drive.

If you're a regular laptop user, the Passport's ease of connection and rugged construction are both useful features - just remember that you're paying a slight premium for them.