Western Digital Passport Help?

I have just recently bought a Western Digital Passport 120gb

I read a lot of articles, many people say it fails, one person mentions that the hard drive usually fails due to the USB power output, I needed a small hard drive for travel, but I can not afford to lose the data you know. The drive it self holds about 111gb, an seriously why, it should be 120gb, but I don't have to send it back.

But all in all as it is, I just wanted to make sure I could figure how to get the maximum power to the drive so it does not fail.

I hope it all makes sense

reasons why it does not read 120 gigs.

1) the formatting of the drive takes some space.
2) harddrive manufacturers call 1gig 1000megs where as in reality it is 1024 mb per gig.

These two reasons are why you don't read 120 gig's.

BTW, I would recomend 2 changes.

1) get a second external drive and don't take it with you, use it as a bakup to your data.
2) make a lot of dvd's to have as another backup.

Some older computers and some PC Card adapters don't provide enough juice from their USB ports to power the HD properly.

A way round this is to get a cable that connects to 2 USB ports to get enough juice.

Most modern PCs will power the HD fine.