The accessories bundle is minimal and includes only a brief user’s manual and a USB cable.

The device uses SATA-USB adapter made by Initio Company. However, we couldn’t find any information on the INIC 1605L micro-chip uses in Passport 250GB on the company’s web-site. They only have data for the newer INIC 1610 micro-chip modification there.

WD Sync software supplied with the Passport 250GB hard drive is exactly the same as the one supplied with the older solutions from the same family. We have already talked about it in our earlier article called 2.5-Inch External Hard Drives with 120GB Storage Capacity.

When you connect this drive to a PC, it is recognized as standard USB Mass Storage and doesn’t require any additional software for simple file copying. However, WD Sync will offer you a number of nice options. Following a Wizard with a user-friendly interface, you can not just copy files to the disk, but also encrypt them with a 128-bit AES encryption key, in case your HDD ends up in someone else’s hands. These data will all be stored on the disk in encrypted form and will only be accessible after entering a password in the WD Sync window. This is a handy and practical solution for always having your confidential information with you.

Besides, WD Sync, the storage solution is also bundled with the following tools and utilities: WD Diagnostic Tool to estimate the HDD status in the system, three Google applications (Picasa, Google Toolbar and Google Desktop Search), Adobe Reader and a brief handbook.

Testbed and Methods

The following testing utilities were used:

• IOMeter 2003.02.15
• WinBench 99 2.0
• FC-Test 1.0

Testbed configuration was as follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro II mainboard
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU
• IBM DTLA-307015 system disk, 15GB
• Radeon 7000 32MB graphics card
• 256MB DDR SDRAM working at 533MHz
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2

We installed the generic OS drivers for our tests. The hard drive was formatted in FAT32 and NTFS as one partition with the default cluster size. For some tests described later in this article 32GB partitions were created and formatted in FAT32 and NTFS with the default cluster size, too.

We didn’t have that many options when choosing the opponent for our hard disk drive – solutions on 2.5-inch platters with large storage capacity like that appeared not so long ago; besides, we haven’t yet come across any other mobile USB HDDs like that. So, we decided to compare the performance of our today’s hero against that of the Western Digital Passport 120GB, which we have already tested before.