WD My Passport Studio - a functional external disk with a screen that will never be sold in Russia
It seems that recently the external hard drives were somehow absurdly expensive. That kind of box with a USB-interface is sold for thirty dollars, the hard drive - well, let's say, for a hundred. If you collect yourself, the cost will be $ 130. But with the so-called. factory price for some reason grew to $ 200 and above. Why, why - is not clear. Therefore, I bought boxes and hard drives separately and collected them together with my own hands. As well as many sellers on Savela and Gorbushka, posing as a homemade product for a branded product. When I came across such a self-assembly, supposedly made by IBM or Sony, I was always happy.
But then WD with its Passports entered the market for external hard drives, and immediately hit the price one and a half times. Following it, Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba and even Hitachi were pulled. The result was excellent competition, and prices collapsed to the level of “disc + box”. Moreover, thanks to the vagaries of Russian logistics, sometimes the purchase price for external hard drives is lower by a couple of dollars than for internal ones of the same capacity.
')
Only then another problem arose: external screws began to differ from each other only in the shape and color of the case. There was nothing to write about them at all. Well, I chose kawai nyak, well, I bought it. The speed is the same for everyone, because it limits its USB interface (in this case I’m talking about portable screws, not stationary ones, where there is still some variety). Do not believe it, but I began to use the box of RaidSonic with anguish, where I put the Seagate and WD screws in turn. But recently tired of tightening the screws, without which the box was constantly opening, throwing out the contents. And I decided to buy myself an external screw, but not simple, but a kind.
At one time I had the first WD Passport (it seems still 60 gig), and therefore I went to search the site of this manufacturer. And still found. It is called WD My Passport Studio. The unusualness in it is my respect. First, on the face there is a screen from E-Paper, which not only shows how much space is left, but also allows you to write some kind of gentle nonsense. The screen is non-volatile, and shows info even if you turn off the power.
Secondly, two interfaces - besides standard USB there is also FireWire. And not some 400, but a whole 800.
Well and, thirdly, there is hardware encryption of all data using the AES algorithm with a 256-bit key. I'm not paranoid, no. It’s just that you can record so much on current screws that you don’t remember what it is. And there is a chance that this something can make someone very happy if it falls into the hands. Therefore - let it be, just once I enter the password is not difficult.
Decided to buy. Got on Price.ru, looked there and ... well, did not work out with it. Totally. It turned out that because of this encryption, the piece of iron must be certified by the relevant authorities, which is simple on paper, and not so much in real life. And therefore in WD decided not to transport this animal to Russia. At all.
Needless to say, this only got me excited, and I asked a former colleague during a visit to Germany to go to a local MediaMarkt and buy it there. It is not forbidden for individuals to use encryption, and as a foreign souvenir from WD My Passport Studio, as one well-known Internet writer says, is very, very. Issue price was 149 euros. In the States, the same model is also 149, but dollars. It was possible to wait until they were equal, but did not.
When first turned on, it turned out that the screw is intended primarily for makovodov. This is noticeable both in appearance, carefully imitating the design of “macbooks”, and on the used HFS + file system. Those who are still sitting on Windows will have to reformat this case. Well, reformatted to NTFS. After that, in principle, you can use it, but to enable hardware encryption, you will also have to install the WD SmartWare utility. She also drives backups, erasing data, recovery and other, and other things. Yes, I almost forgot: when you plug the beast into the computer, two devices appear - the actual disk and the virtual CD-ROM with the instruction and distribution kit of the service program. The constant presence of the virtual is a bit annoying and, if you install a new firmware version, you can turn it off. But I did not succeed: for some reason, the updater cursed the presence of incomprehensible USB devices in the system, even if I pulled them all together. I will still understand.
Well, about the speed.
With USB 2.0, everything is clear, the maximum is squeezed out of the interface, so I will not even bore my readers with tsifiryu.
But FireWire 800 lives by default only in decent Macs, whereas I am a stubborn PC-sideler. And in my motherboard Intel DX58SO there is only FireWire 400. Yes, and in the same laptop. To the credit of the guys from WD, they put an adapter to this awfully slow interface for such unfortunate users :)
So on it the average sequential read speed was 40.8 megs per second, and the records - 30 megs. That is almost on the verge of interface capabilities. Given that the WD Scorpio Blue 6400BEVT screw used inside WD My Passport Studio easily pumps more than 90 megs in both directions, the utility of the FireWire 800 looks obvious. But I don’t want something for Mac, and a separate controller for a PC costs about a hundred dollars. Expensive with. I will use the 400th for now, but we'll see.
In general, what can I say?
Separately, the WD 6400BEVT screw can be bought for $ 110-115 (ohrenet, in general, 640 gigs for that kind of money! I remember I gave $ 270 for my first WD of 1.2 gig!). That is, the box and cable cost more than 50 euros. Yes, not cheap. But, given the originality of the decision and quite a kosher brand, money is not a pity. Plus, not everyone needs such volumes, and the 320-gig version costs a hundred euros.
Lack of two. First, the already mentioned problems with the firmware - I already tried it on three computers, the result is the same.
Secondly, the box is only pretending to be aluminum, but in fact it is made of silver plastic, which, like an infection, is scratched. I, of course, not glamorous Kiso, scratches do not bother me. But still a bit annoying.
A RaidSonic box is still useful for replacing screws in laptops.
Update: I connected the beast to a Packard Bell laptop with Vista Home Premium - I found the screw right away, updated the firmware. Before that I tried XP Professional and Vista Ultimate. The logic is not very clear, but still glad that it was updated.
But then WD with its Passports entered the market for external hard drives, and immediately hit the price one and a half times. Following it, Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba and even Hitachi were pulled. The result was excellent competition, and prices collapsed to the level of “disc + box”. Moreover, thanks to the vagaries of Russian logistics, sometimes the purchase price for external hard drives is lower by a couple of dollars than for internal ones of the same capacity.
')
Only then another problem arose: external screws began to differ from each other only in the shape and color of the case. There was nothing to write about them at all. Well, I chose kawai nyak, well, I bought it. The speed is the same for everyone, because it limits its USB interface (in this case I’m talking about portable screws, not stationary ones, where there is still some variety). Do not believe it, but I began to use the box of RaidSonic with anguish, where I put the Seagate and WD screws in turn. But recently tired of tightening the screws, without which the box was constantly opening, throwing out the contents. And I decided to buy myself an external screw, but not simple, but a kind.
At one time I had the first WD Passport (it seems still 60 gig), and therefore I went to search the site of this manufacturer. And still found. It is called WD My Passport Studio. The unusualness in it is my respect. First, on the face there is a screen from E-Paper, which not only shows how much space is left, but also allows you to write some kind of gentle nonsense. The screen is non-volatile, and shows info even if you turn off the power.
Secondly, two interfaces - besides standard USB there is also FireWire. And not some 400, but a whole 800.
Well and, thirdly, there is hardware encryption of all data using the AES algorithm with a 256-bit key. I'm not paranoid, no. It’s just that you can record so much on current screws that you don’t remember what it is. And there is a chance that this something can make someone very happy if it falls into the hands. Therefore - let it be, just once I enter the password is not difficult.
Decided to buy. Got on Price.ru, looked there and ... well, did not work out with it. Totally. It turned out that because of this encryption, the piece of iron must be certified by the relevant authorities, which is simple on paper, and not so much in real life. And therefore in WD decided not to transport this animal to Russia. At all.
Needless to say, this only got me excited, and I asked a former colleague during a visit to Germany to go to a local MediaMarkt and buy it there. It is not forbidden for individuals to use encryption, and as a foreign souvenir from WD My Passport Studio, as one well-known Internet writer says, is very, very. Issue price was 149 euros. In the States, the same model is also 149, but dollars. It was possible to wait until they were equal, but did not.
When first turned on, it turned out that the screw is intended primarily for makovodov. This is noticeable both in appearance, carefully imitating the design of “macbooks”, and on the used HFS + file system. Those who are still sitting on Windows will have to reformat this case. Well, reformatted to NTFS. After that, in principle, you can use it, but to enable hardware encryption, you will also have to install the WD SmartWare utility. She also drives backups, erasing data, recovery and other, and other things. Yes, I almost forgot: when you plug the beast into the computer, two devices appear - the actual disk and the virtual CD-ROM with the instruction and distribution kit of the service program. The constant presence of the virtual is a bit annoying and, if you install a new firmware version, you can turn it off. But I did not succeed: for some reason, the updater cursed the presence of incomprehensible USB devices in the system, even if I pulled them all together. I will still understand.
Well, about the speed.
With USB 2.0, everything is clear, the maximum is squeezed out of the interface, so I will not even bore my readers with tsifiryu.
But FireWire 800 lives by default only in decent Macs, whereas I am a stubborn PC-sideler. And in my motherboard Intel DX58SO there is only FireWire 400. Yes, and in the same laptop. To the credit of the guys from WD, they put an adapter to this awfully slow interface for such unfortunate users :)
So on it the average sequential read speed was 40.8 megs per second, and the records - 30 megs. That is almost on the verge of interface capabilities. Given that the WD Scorpio Blue 6400BEVT screw used inside WD My Passport Studio easily pumps more than 90 megs in both directions, the utility of the FireWire 800 looks obvious. But I don’t want something for Mac, and a separate controller for a PC costs about a hundred dollars. Expensive with. I will use the 400th for now, but we'll see.
In general, what can I say?
Separately, the WD 6400BEVT screw can be bought for $ 110-115 (ohrenet, in general, 640 gigs for that kind of money! I remember I gave $ 270 for my first WD of 1.2 gig!). That is, the box and cable cost more than 50 euros. Yes, not cheap. But, given the originality of the decision and quite a kosher brand, money is not a pity. Plus, not everyone needs such volumes, and the 320-gig version costs a hundred euros.
Lack of two. First, the already mentioned problems with the firmware - I already tried it on three computers, the result is the same.
Secondly, the box is only pretending to be aluminum, but in fact it is made of silver plastic, which, like an infection, is scratched. I, of course, not glamorous Kiso, scratches do not bother me. But still a bit annoying.
A RaidSonic box is still useful for replacing screws in laptops.
Update: I connected the beast to a Packard Bell laptop with Vista Home Premium - I found the screw right away, updated the firmware. Before that I tried XP Professional and Vista Ultimate. The logic is not very clear, but still glad that it was updated.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/94211/
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