Western Digital My Passport Studio – no support for USB 3.0

Thumbs Up:

Supports USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 connections; sleek portable and compact design with electronic label

Thumbs Down:

No support for USB 3.0; needs improvement in FireWire performance; relatively high cost per gigabyte

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

The Western Digital My Passport Studio is a 640GB portable external hard-drive. It has inbuilt LCD status and password protection.

The interfaces are 1×Hi-Speed USB, 1×IEEE 1394 (FireWire), and 1×IEEE 1394b (FireWire 800). The maximum operating temperature is 104°F and minimum is 41°F.

The supported operating systems are Windows XP/Vista/7 and Apple Mac OS X 10.4/10.5/10.6.

Accessories supplied inside the box are USB cable, external IEEE 1394 cable, an IEEE 1394 adapter, package, and user manual. The Western Digital is providing three years limited warranty with its My Passport Studio hard-drive.

Razzle Dazzle:

The Western Digital My Passport Studio is 4.9 inches deep, 3.3 inches wide and 0.7 inch tall and weighs 6.3 ounces. It has sleek aluminum casing with customizable electronic label.

Inside Dope:

The Western Digital My Passport Studio is a nice portable external hard drive with 640GB storage and customizable electronic label that works even when the drive is not plugged in. It is one of the most portable and full-featured Western Digital hard drives. The Studio drive only offers USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 connections. On the down side, it does not support USB 3.0 standard and needs improvement in its FireWire performance, especially for Windows. Actually, $200 priced 640GB the Studio is preformatted for Macs and can also work on Windows computer. You can also get its 320GB and 500GB versions for $150 and $180 respectively. Noteworthy that My Passport Studio drive is available in the United States, Canada, and Latin America.

The electronic label can show any 12 characters long message that is enough for depicting name of owner or drive content. It also displays available storage amount and storage gauge. The Western Digital My Passport Studio has inbuilt WD SmartWare software that is included inside a separate read-only partition. This software will be installed automatically in two minutes on connecting the drive first time. After that it will pop-up and run every time on connecting the drive.

You can use this software to change the label and to lock the drive with a password. The label will remain visible even when drive is turned off. It is better to use password security to protect the data, but if you forget it then there is no way to break it down. For it, you have to reset the hard drive that will erase all the stored data.

The WD SmartWare has backup feature for the users. It quickly categorizes all the data on stored on main hard drive in these categories: Mail, Documents, Picture, Music, Movies and Others. It will display the storage amount for each category and allows selecting the categories for backup. However, it does not allow choosing which folder or document to backup. You cannot backup the date-specific data like word documents created in March and the software also does not allow taking automatic backup.

We like that you can recover the previously backed up documents to their original place or at a new location using the SmartWare software. More to like – the Mac users can u se the OS X inbuilt Time Machine.

As already mentioned, the Western Digital My Passport Studio drive is preformatted for Mac OS X and you can also format it for Windows.

The My Passport Studio drive will cost 31 cents ($0.31) per gigabyte. It is more than $0.27 for Fujitsu HandyDrive, $0.3 for Transcend Storjet 25F and Iomega eGo Portable.

With USB 2.0 connection, the WD Studio drive handled 25MBps for writing and 29.8MBps for reading. These speeds are faster for a portable external hard drive. In contrast, it registered 9MBbps for both writing and reading on FireWire 400 and 800 connections.

Western Digital is providing three years warranty with the My Passport Studio drive; which is less than five-year for previous version of My Passport Studio. The company is also providing toll-free phone technical support from 8AM to 7PM CST from Monday to Thursday, and 8AM to 5PM from Friday to Saturday. It has also published the online installation guide, knowledgebase, product RMA, and downloads on its Web site.

Nitty Gritty:

If are looking for a USB 2.0 based hard-drive, especially for Mac and can afford expensive price tag then we will recommend – the Western Digital My Passport Studio. However, please remember that it does not support USB 3.0.

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