|
Software Installation and Setup Page 2 of 3
Software Installation & Setup:
Software installation is super simple and is pretty automatic. When you plug in the Passport for the first time you should be greeted with an Autoplay menu that gives you several options as seen below. You can run the WD Sync software, install some bundled Google Software, register the drive or view a user's guide. There was an update to the WD Sync software which was very quickly downloaded over my slow wireless internet connection.
Although I use most of the Google software that is included, I find it irritating that Western Digital has included this bundle. I find that it cheapens the product as it comes loaded with "advertising" for Google and does not add value to the product. I know other people who don't use these products would find them useful and this is merely my preference. Combined with the WD Sync software Picasa would be a handy thing to have on this drive.
Google Software
The WD Sync installation and setup is very straightforward and the interface is nice and clean. It looks professional without looking too Windows 98'ish. Please click any of the thumbnails below for full-sized images.
Sync Software - Step 1
|
Sync Software - Step 2
|
Sync Software - Step 3
|
| |
|
|
Sync Software - Step 4a
|
Sync Software - Step 4b
|
Sync Software - Step 5
|
Using WD Sync:
The beautiful thing about the Passport is the ease in which you can backup your files, take then to another machine and synchronize them on that machine as well. Below we'll take a look at the using the WD Sync software, where it puts the data and how much strain it puts on your system.
I set up a fairly hefty backup job that used 18GB of space on the Passport. I selected the files you've seen above and let it go. It put the files in G:\WD Sync Data\BCCTest\Data\Sync4.0deposit\. The BCCTest subfolder is tagged with the same name as you backup job. After the Sync job was ran, the "deposit" folder contained 26 folders tagged A - Z and each folder contains 500 items.
Sync - Data Folder
|
Folders A-Z
|
WD Sync encrypts and compresses the data as it transfers it to the Passport and I opened the Windows Task Manager to see how much CPU load it was taking on my little Core 2 Duo T5500 1.66GHz laptop. It is fairly CPU intensive and it pulled anywhere between 23% to 37% CPU load.
CPU Load
Now that we've got the real-world tests out of the way, let's take a look and see how HDTach, PCMark and SiSoft stack up on the next page.
|
