WD passport essential or Seagate FreeAgent Go?

[faye]

Hi,

I am looking for a 2.5" 320Gb portable harddrive.
Now i come up with these two options.

WD passport essential
Seagate FreeAgent Go (the one with many colours too choose, not the black one)

are these two both using USB to get power?
Mostly to transfer DVD movies. So which one has better transfer rate?

Please advise, cuz i think i am going to get one after work today if there are enough supporting input.

thx

 

[RebateMonger]

It's always risky to make assumptions about hard drive reliability based on individual experience. But I'm concerned about the reliability of the WD passport series. There's a lot of web complaints, the one I purchased for a client had startup seek errors, and I've had to do data recovery on several Western Digital (non-Passport) external drives. So, on that basis, I'd vote Seagate (and I'm NOT a Seagate fanboy).

As I recall, in an online "drop test" of portable hard drives, the Passport didn't do well, either.

 

[faye]

Thank you for the input,

however i have had a few WD 3.5" drives from 60GB to now 640GB and they are doing pretty well.

It seems it is really depending on your luck whether you'll get the better drive or the opposite.

 

[faye]

anyways,
I just bought the WD Passport Essential 320GB white version.

Do i have to install the files or any drivers to get the best performance out of it?
or at least do i have to format the drive in the beginning?

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: faye
however i have had a few WD 3.5" drives from 60GB to now 640GB and they are doing pretty well.

WD's 3.5-inch drives have been kind to me over the years (except for the DOA 1.0 TB drive I recently received).

Originally posted by: faye
Do i have to install the files or any drivers to get the best performance out of it?
or at least do i have to format the drive in the beginning?

Truthfully, I didn't even look at the utilities. For use with XP or Vista, I'd recommend formatting the drive NTFS if it isn't already. I don't remember what it came with.