I’ve had a Western Digital Passport 320gb for about 2 years and have had intermittant connection problems:
- The first problem is well known and is common with external drives – not just WD Passport ones. The Passport drive will often not draw enough power from a single USB port with the cable supplied by Western Digital. The solution is easy – get a USB “Y” cable or “booster” cable. It has an extra USB plug at the end so you can draw more power from a second USB port. I have a few “Y” cables at home and have always had to use one to power my WD Passport. WD sells one in its store here:
But they come standard with most (but not all) 2.5" hard drive enclosures today, and you can get one for about $15-20 shipped from Newegg, Tiger Direct or Amazon. So it’s a better deal as you get the enclosure too which can come in very handy to make an extra external drive out of an old laptop drive. If you go this route, buy a SATA enclosure instead of an IDE or ATA enclosure as most laptop drives today have SATA connections. However, if you know you have a spare IDE drive around that you want to utilitze, buy an enclosure with an IDE connection.
It would be nice if WD supplied the Y/booster cable as a standard accessory with all its Passport drives.
- The second problem I’ve had I think pertains mainly to the Passport and the model I have. The USB mini jack is a litle too large/loose, resulting in a loose connection with the USB cord that causes the drive to frequently disconnect from my laptop while in use. Even a little movement will cause the disconnects. This has been highly annoying, and this past week almost resulted in a catastrophe. What happened was it disconnected from my laptoip while I was transferring an 8gb folder. Windows immediately threw up error messages about read/write failures. When I re-connected the Passport, Windows would recognize it but not fully and when I tried clicking on the drive in My Computer, I got an error message: “Error performing inpage operation.” So I couldn’t browse the drive nor perform a chkdsk normally as the right-click menu was not showing up either. A google search thankfully turned up the solution. I had to use a DOS command to run chkdsk on the Passport which fixed the drive.
But to avoid this issue in the future, I knew I had to put the drive in a new enclosure. Thankfully I had a spare SATA enclusure handy and so I put the Passport drive in there. Since doing that, the drive has been running like a champ. NO DISCONNECTS. Zero. What’s more, it seems to be more responsive in terms of transfer speed and browsing files on the drive. I should have done this earlier as I knew about the problem for a few months. I can only chalk this problem up to poor quality control.The mini USB port that WD put in this model of the Passport is of poor quality.
Be careful, as I have read that not all WD Passport drives can be extracted from their enclosures … that some of the newer models have the USB port permanently attached to the drive which prevents you from re-using the drive in a notebook and also from putting it in another external exclosure. But my Passport is R/N: B7B and these can easily be taken out of the plastic enclosure that it comes with. Look on the back label for the R/N number. For instructions on how to take apart thismodel, do a search on YouTube for “Western Digital Passport disassembly” and look at the video by the person called “amerist” … his instructions are easy to follow.
If you want a recommendation of a HD enclosure, look at the Rosewill model RX81U-AT-25A at Newegg. This is what I have my WD Passport drive in now. It’s solid and runs smoothly. No Issues. And I feel better knowing that my data is better protected from dodgy USB connections.
Your data is too important to take chances. So if you have the B7B Passport model and are getting these constant disconnects, I highly recommend trying this solution. If you have another model proceed with caution, because as I said, not all Passport drives can be put in another enclosure.
–Pat
