Western Digital My Passport Studio Portable Hard Drive – Silver
Posted by Notcot on Sep 20, 2010 in Handhelds & PDAs |
Product Description
Western Digital HD Passport Studio500GB USB 20 FW800 WDBAAE5000ASLEESN Storage External Hard Drives
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Western Digital My Passport Studio Portable Hard Drive – Silver
Should be first choice for all Mac users, because it dovetails perfectly with Time Machine, and is therefor easy to set up. As a Mac novice, I had some difficulty in updating my Passport, and was rewarded for my trouble by receiving a message stating that the downloading I had been doing was unnecessary ! My advice is therefore don’t bother. A big benefit of the system is that it is incremental, so after a lengthy backup or two, it settles down to a quick and easy job. Well pleased overall. All leads are supplied, albeit a little short. (At least you don’t catch your feet in them ! )
Rating: 5 / 5
seems to be fast and easy to use, its very small / portable and has a novel screen!
Rating: 3 / 5
Just got this last week and was very pleased with how easy the drive links to Apple’s Time Machine (automatic on plugging in). It does take quite some time to back up the entire computer the first time (overnight and then some for 108GB), but subsequent backups take a few seconds.
No loose cords, looks like that problem has been fixed.
The one thing I do have issue with is updates. Whenever I attempt to update the firmware the drive gets bumped off my desktop and no update is possible. I have researched problem and apparently it might be possible to update on a PC, but as this version from WD is supposed to be for MAC why haven’t they created the updates to work smoothly on the MAC platform?
A bit sloppy.
Otherwise the drive seems to do what it should.
Rating: 4 / 5
I recently upgraded the internal hard drive of my MacBook Pro from 200gb to 500gb, so needed to buy a larger 500gb external drive for back ups. Having previously used an external drive with USB connection (which was slow) I wanted a 2.5″ portable drive with firewire (and was surprised to find relatively few available on the market). After doing (far too much) research, I finally opted for the WD My Passport Studio… primarily because of the stylish design and the fact it comes from a (reasonably) reputable brand.
I don’t use the supplied backup software (or Time Machine for that matter) instead opting to to create a ‘bootable clone’ of my Macbook’s hard drive (using software called SuperDuper). This works really well (and the transfer speeds via firewire are much better than USB) but if you want to do the same, you may need to ditch the supplied software, and do without password protection on the drive.
That said, the supplied software is nicely designed, easy enough to use, and works well with Time Machine… so most Mac owners should be happy with it.
As for the labelling function.. this is really just a gimmick and not something I require, but hey, it looks cool, and if you want to buy multiple drives it could be a useful feature.
The drive came with several leads, including a firewire 400/800 adaptor. I didn’t think I would need this, but it has already come in useful when I needed to copy some files off a an old Mac G4. As the previous reviewer suggests, the leads are rather short, but this means less cabling to carry around with what (after all) is designed to be a portable unit.
What are the downsides to this drive then?
Firstly the plastic casing feels a little cheap to the touch for a drive of this price (you can after all buy an aluminium enclosure for just a few pounds). Secondly it can get quite warm to the touch (but from my experience, so do most other drives). Finally, it does not come with a protective case, and could scratch easily… so you may want to budget a few extra pounds for a case such as this one:-
Case Logic – Compact Portable Hard Drive Case
In summary, yes, it is expensive (there are cheaper ones out there)… but it looks good, and does the job really well, so is worth the premium in my opinion.
Rating: 5 / 5