WD Passport failing. Help!

[Shooty*]

Morning all,
I'm on about my fifth WD Passport. I've changed in the past as capacities improved, etc, and I've always been happy with them. At the moment I've got one of the ones which has the slidey cover over the USB connection. I think it's a Passport Elite. It's a little old.

It's recently started playing up. I can copy files to and from it fine for the most part, but rather frequently now it will allow me to copy things TO it, but if, say, I'm transferring files between machines, I cannot copy the same file FROM it to another computer. So copying TO is OK, but copying FROM is causing problems.

I've run the WD disc utility, which said it was unable to complete either the quick or thorough tests (bit of a warning there, I feel) though it was able to write 0s to the whole thing. I've run scandisk in c prompt, which found bad sectors and added them to the bad sector list. A second run then found no additional problems, but the copying issue remains.

...

It's borked, isn't it?

I've basically reached that decision. So... I need a new drive.

What do you reckon? Stick with WD, or has someone else taken the crown?

Reliability is probably my biggest factor, though it has to be a 2.5 inch powered by the USB connection and not a separate power brick.

Thanks

[ghost_florian]

It's very tricky with hard drives. There are several big names (Seagate, WD, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba), but all of them have been known to fail.
I can't advise you on a brand or model, but what I can advise you is to look for the hard drive with the most generous warranty period. This means that the manufacturer is confident enough in its reliability that he is willing to give a larger warranty period.

[Shooty*]

Words of wisdom. Thanks, Ghost

[g8ina]

I always wonder about this little portable drives with only 1 USB connection for power. They must struggle surely !

[Shooty*]

Hey,
Done some looking around, and have plumped for one of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...3HT7MK1F9S70GW

as a replacement. German, looks good. Was tempted by a Platinum drive which you can find on Amazon, which looks very funky, but didnt' seem to offer any real protection/ cushioning for the drive. Will let you know what it's like when it arrives.

Have gone off WD Passports. Don't know why they got rid of old Elite design: they were great little drives. The new ones look horrible, and with the built in smartware are apparently quite annoying.

Am making conscious decision to ALWAYS use Y shaped USB cable on these things now. Have temperamental USB ports on top edge of desktop PC (from a header on the mobo) and on Macbook Pro, so better safe than sorry.