Product Description

USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 Connection

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35849 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Western Digital
• Model: WDMS2500TN
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 3.15" h x 2.36" w x .79" l, 1.98 pounds
• Memory: 2MB
• Hard Disk: 250GB

Features

• Sold Individually

Customer Reviews

Flimsy proprietary firewire connector
I love firewire. Any firewire cable I have connects any two firewire devices I have -- except this one.

After I fought this disk out of its packaging, I discovered it requires its very own kind of firewire cable -- with a regular firewire 400 end for all the other devices and a two-cable divided end for its own connectors.

Okay, I thought, at least it comes with a storage bag so it's easy to stow the cable with the drive and hopefully not lose it -- I plugged the two little ends into the drive, which was difficult because they were oriented with opposing twists so it was hard to get the second one lined up to go in with the first one plugged in. I plugged the firewire 400 end into my mac, and waited for the drive to power up. Nothing happened.

Looked at the drive, noticed that the second little connector bit had come loose. Gosh guess it needs to be more firmly seated. Shove it in with vigor. Put the drive down. Connector comes loose. Why do I think that a loose power connector might not be a recipe for reliability on a hard drive?

Package up the drive and return it the next day. Thank heavens Amazon returns are easy peasy. Unfortunately this is the only firewire pocket drive I really like on Amazon.com, so I have to go somewhere else to find my time machine.

Stay away, far away if you use Apple laptops
I bought this Passport Studio for use with a PowerBook G4 and a brand-new MacBook Air. It's an attractive, compact, and stylish device. Unfortunately, form must follow function, and in this case, it's functionality comes up short. I'm returning it.

It suffers from a number of shortcomings:
- the short USB cable that came with it went intermittently bad shortly after I started using it. This caused lots of problems until I finally troubleshot the intermittent connection.
- the drive is NOT USB 2.0 compliant, despite what WD claims. It won't spin up or mount when connected to either of the PowerBook's USB ports. It will mount on the MacBook (using a working USB cable). I filed a trouble ticket with WD - they pointed me at a knowledgebase article indicating the the drive "requires a minimum of 1000 mA to function". The USB 2.0 spec clearly defines the max power available from a powered hub or host as 500 mA. So it's not in compliance with the USB spec.
- WD suggested that I purchase their accessory USB power supply. Yet the product advertising states "FireWire or USB powered - No separate power supply needed".
- I connected it the MacBook Air, using a Canon USB camera cable I happened to have. Put the MBA to sleep. The drive promptly wakes it up. Put the MBA to sleep again. The drive wakes it up. None of my other USB drives cause this to happen. The Passport Studio does not observe the USB standard in this regard either.
- I did a clean install of Leopard onto the drive, while connected with FW400 to my PowerBook. No problems encountered. Then discovered that the drive cannot be used to boot from Firewire. WD tech support indicates that this is a known limitation of the Passport Studio, documented in another KB article.
- I was able to boot my MacBook Air from the drive over the USB connection. Ran fine as a boot drive, until I put the MacBook to sleep. Then it woke right back up. WD Tech Support said tough luck, 'we don't support it as a boot device'.

My intent had been to partition the Passport drive into two logical drives, and use SuperDuper to create bootable clones of both my laptops. Then stash the drive away in my secret hiding place to guard against disk crashes. Instead, it's going back.

Western Digital's My Passport studio external HD
Well made, nice styling, easy to use and setup. But will not boot-up or startup Mac PowerPC G5 models. It supposedly will boot-up or startup Mac's that have Intel cpu's. I wanted this drive to use as a backup startup drive with disk utilities, etc. I was disappointed when after buying this drive to find that it will not do what I wanted it to do. All my other firewire external drives and enclosures are able to boot my Macs.