The p-Code Machine

I recently acquired a Western Digital Elements Portable 500GB 2.5″ drive. It’s a no fuss drive, this is as simple as it gets. The drive looks quite nice, again because it’s simplicity in it’s design.

After zeroing the complete disk surface no bad sectors were reallocated, since the drive (as most WDC’s) can provide SMART information via USB to DeviceKit/palimpsest. This may sound as-if it’s the most common thing in the world, but it’s not, it’s not a fair assumption any random USB drive will supply SMART information via USB.

The drive can do about 28MB/sec sustained (benchmarked during the full surface wipe). So this is a real world figure for sustained sequential IO.

Another nice feature is the fact that the drive does not seem to require a split USB cable to draw more power from the host system than a single port can provide.