Western Digital My Passport Studio 320GB Portable Hard Drive Review

Ed Lau

16 years ago

Prev1 of 3Next

Less isn’t more when it comes to computers. More, in fact, is actually more. More RAM, more speed, more display real estate and more hard drive space. You can never really have too much of any of these things. Unfortunately with laptops, we’re a bit limited and at press time, the largest HD you can get on a notebook is 500GB, which would be a lot if it was still 2003. On a recent three month trip to Japan, all the pictures and video I shot alone easily exceeded the entire hard drive of my MacBook Pro. That’s where products like the Western Digital My Passport Studio Hard Drives come in handy.

Western Digital’s My Passport Studio series of portable hard drives comes in sizes ranging from 250GB (as tested) to 500GB. Coming out of the box MAC formatted and with a Firewire port attached, this product is clearly aimed at Mac Cultists.

Features and Specifications

Since Western Digital manufacturers their own hard drives, you’ll be getting one of their own 2.5 inch drives on the inside with a fairly standard 5400RPM spindle speed.

The drive measures (HxWxL): 0.709″ (18mm) x 3.189″ (81mm) x 4.99″ (126.74mm) and weights 0.40lbs (0.18kg). Light and thin is definitely the order of the day. The drive also features both USB 2.0 and Firewire 400. A newer version of the drive also features Firewire 800.

Although the Passport Studio is formatted for Mac OS Extended (Journaled), it is entirely possible to reformat the drive for use with Windows. However, you can always pick up the PC version of the drive albeit without the Firewire interface. We should also note that the My Passport Studio has a five year limited warranty, which is pretty fantastic. Most other drives have a one to three year warranty.

What’s In The Box?

The cable for the My Passport Studio is a bit unusual. It connects only to your Firewire port but on the unit, it also plugs into the mini-USB for power. For those of you who want to use just the USB 2.0, there’s an included cable for that as well.

There’s also a small pouch to keep your Passport Studio from getting scuffed up (since we Mac users seem to be rather aesthetically focused). There’s also the usual manuals and such that most of us will throw straight into the garbage.

First Impressions

The My Passport Studio is clearly designed with Mac users in mind not only with the Mac OS formatting out of the box but also because of the matte silver finish. This finish is nearly identical to that of the MacBook Pro, iMac and the latest generation of MacBooks.

There are some clever touches in the design as well. A set of white LEDs indicate how much space is left on the drive as well as drive activity. The panel on top of the LEDs slides over when the unit isn’t in use to keep the mini-Firewire and mini-USB ports from getting dusty.

Real-Time Price and Stock Check – Find More Western Digital Hard Drives

Setting Things Up

Once you’ve decided whether to use it as a Firewire or a USB drive (current Unibody MacBook owners have no choice but to choose USB 2.0), you just need to slide the cover open, plug it in and it’ll mount on your desktop as a standard Firewire or USB drive.

Although there is software and utilities on the drive, nothing is actually needed to use the Passport Studio. Just plug it in and you’re ready to go. The software for Mac is only a little toolbar icon that lets you know about the status of the drive like percentage hard drive space filled.

Testing

All tests with the WD My Passport Studio were done on my MacBook Pro (the previous generation without the glossy screen) with a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM and running the latest updated version of Mac OSX 10.5.5. The laptop’s own hard drive is a standard 250GB HD formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

In order to test the drive’s write transfer speed, I copied a folder with 1GB of various files over to the Passport Studio from my MacBook Pro’s hard drive. Here’s what the stop watch said…

Copy via FW400: 35 seconds
Copy via USB2.0: 41 seconds

This results in a transfer speed of 28.57 MB/s using the FW400 and 24.39 MB/s using the USB 2.0. Those speeds aren’t going to set the world on fire but that’s not bad for a 2.5 inch portable hard drive. It’s on par with other competing products.

Final Thoughts

While it certainly won’t matter to a lot of people out there, the My Passport Studio does look rather attractive. I mean, less isn’t more when it comes to hard drive space but it is in terms of design. Other than perhaps LaCie, not too many manufacturers of products like this actually make them aesthetically pleasing. It’s a good thing that WD included a little pouch for the unit as well. I’m sure some time with all your other peripherals couped up in your Booq Bag would scratch it up quite a bit.

I would’ve liked to have seen Firewire 800 support as well as backwards compatibility with Firewire 400. Luckily, Western Digital has answered that call with a new product but clearly Firewire 800 is more of a MacBook Pro thing as none of the other MacBooks have Firewire 800 and the new Unibody MacBooks have no Firewire ports, just USB 2.0. Hopefully we’ll be able to check out the new version that supports not only Firewire 800 but also has some new Turbo Drivers for Mac that should speed up throughput.

The Western Digital My Passport Studio works well, looks good, has a fantastic warranty and has a couple small touches that set it apart from the competition. Definitely recommended.

Pros