Western Digital My Passport Studio 250GB

Western Digital My Passport Studio 250GB

Jayesh Limaye, Sep 18, 2008 1323 hrs IST

Will this Mac-ready drive be able to attract you with its performance, or is it only about great looks. Let's find out.

Gorgeous looks, Good performance, USB and FireWire interface, Carry pouch, Capacity gauge.

Pricey, No software CD.

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EXPERT REVIEW

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The Drive



The My Passport Studio comes packed in a nice transparent plastic pack with an attractive red and black color scheme.

Dimensionally, My Passport Studio is an almost exact clone of the My Passport Elite and is very much similar to the older Passport drives, but there are a few changes that have been introduced in the looks as well as features. The drive we received had a casing with an aluminum-like luster. Unlike the My Passport Elite, this drive does not come in any other color scheme.

The casing is unlike the normal Passport hard drive, which is glossy and easily attracts fingerprints. The casing of the Elite has a smooth feel with a powder coating-like finish and it does not catch fingerprints or dirt marks. The sides of the drive are glossy, which adds a touch of style to this drive. The drive is slim with a thickness of just 1.5 cm and can easily be slipped into your pocket.



The front of the drive has a Mini USB port and a B-type FireWire port, protected by a sliding transparent polymer door, so that the ports don't get clogged by dust.



Just beside the port are a set of four LEDs, which serve as activity indicators by lighting up from end to end. They also serve as a capacity gauge of sorts by lighting up from left to right as the drive gets filled up. This is just a rough indicator with each of the four LEDs indicating about 25% of the drive capacity.

As this is for Mac users, the drive comes preformatted with HPFS. If you are a Windows user (as majority of computer users are), you need to format it to NTFS. As stated earlier, the software is provided on the drive and you need to back it up to avoid having to download it again in case you happen to lose it.

The drive boasts of a huge 250 GB capacity - sufficient for just about every purpose. It can backup most MacBooks, but a larger capacity Mac may need a larger drive. There is a WD Scorpio 250GB 5400 RPM laptop hard drive inside the enclosure and the Scorpio drives are known for their good performance. But the interface is the bottleneck here and the drive inside is not much of a factor.


Software

This drive does not come with any software; neither is there a bundled CD nor is there anything on the drive itself. We tried to find if we can download anything from the WD site's download section for this drive, but all that we could find is a diagnostic utility, a formatting utility and drivers.

There is no backup software. There is also the WD Drive Manager, after installing which, it remains quietly in the system tray and provides you information about the drive temperature, and the capacity in use. It is mentioned that the drive works well with Apple's Time Machine, but we did not have a chance to try it out with a Mac.

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USER COMMENTS

what is the cost of hard disk?

by chandu, kakinad, on Sep 22, 2008 02:40 PM, Report abuse   Reply

very good hardware

by simon thomas, dubai, on Sep 20, 2008 08:56 AM, Report abuse   Reply

nice review

by james, cal, on Sep 18, 2008 05:26 PM, Report abuse   Reply

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