Will USB WD passport drive work on my Dell?

I have an older Dell Desktop (4550) running Windows XP with USB 2.0 ports.

Does anyone know if I would have any problems using a WD Passport 80 GB portable(2.5" format) USB drive to clone my internal hard drive?

I would assume that all USB 2.0 ports would have the necessary power to run the external drive, but I don't know that for sure.

Regards

 

I use it the 80gb Passport for my Dell XPS-400, and have NO problems at all. It works great! It's powered by your Front Side Bus. You shouldn't have any problems.

 

Hello data7,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

We do not expect any problems using Acronis True Image 9.0 Home for both cloning your internal hard drive and saving backups to Western Digital external USB hard drive connected to the computer running Windows XP through USB 2.0 port. However, there is no actual need to clone your internal hard drive to the external USB disk of any kind, as none of the currently available Windows versions supports booting from the USB attached storage devices (see the respective Microsoft Knowledge Base Article for details).

Generally, there are two approaches available:

Clone Disk - copies\moves the entire contents of one disk drive to another;

Backup - creates a special archive file having '.tib' extension for backup and disaster recovery purposes;

Please take a look at this FAQ article explaining the difference between 'Clone Disk' and 'Backup' approaches in more details.

The 'Clone Disk' approach is meant for upgrading the hard drive (e.g. installing a larger disk), while the 'Backup' approach is intended for the complete data backup and disaster recovery purposes.

As you are interested in backing up your hard drive for the disaster recovery purposes, we recommend that you follow the 'Backup' approach, i.e. create backups of saving them to your external USB hard drive.

Moreover, there are several advantages of creating a disk\partition image over the disk cloning procedure such as that you can create an image without rebooting your computer, image creation can be scheduled for the particular point in time, Acronis True Image allows you to create incremental and differential images, image archive contains only the actual data and so it has a smaller size, images are ordinary files and can be stored on any type of the supported media (e.g. any internal, external or networked drives, CD, DVD, ZIP, etc.), etc. However, the final choice is always up to your needs.

We recommend that you download and install the free trial version of Acronis True Image 9.0 Home in order to be completely sure that the software works fine on your particular software\hardware configuration.

You can find the detailed instructions on how to use Acronis True Image 9.0 Home in the respective User's Guide.

We also recommend that you take a look at Acronis True Image 9.0 Home FAQ page, Acronis Public Knowledge Base and this article providing the illustrated instructions on Acronis True Image 9.0 Home installation and usage.

If you are satisfied with the work of the free trial version, please visit Acronis online store to purchase the full version of the product.

If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

There should be no problem. I back up Dell desktops with my passport drive regularly. I often use the front USB port, but if you have any problem use a rear port since there is an extra cable from the motherboard to the front ports, and long cable length can be a problem.