Product Reviews

Western Digital's My Passport Studio is the Mac version of the company's My Passport line of portable hard drives. It includes a capacity gauge, in the form of four LEDs and a FireWire 800 port alongside the USB 2 interface. It also comes with a FireWire 800 to 400 cable.

The silver-and-black plastic case looks good, and will complement any Mac in Apple's range but, like Iomega's Helium (below), it doesn't feel particularly robust and we wouldn't feel confident in carrying around critical data on it. The location of the ports and the capacity gauge are somewhat odd, too. Judging by the positioning of the logo on the top of

ADVERTISEMENT

the drive, we assume that both ports and gauge are on the front of the drive. In reality, however, most people will turn the drive around, so that the ports are on the back. This means the capacity gauge is useless because you can't see it. From an engineering point of view, it makes sense to have the ports and the gauge next to each other, but it renders the gauge pointless from a usability standpoint.

The device ships with drivers designed to 'turbo boost' performance. They require a restart once you've installed them, but we were keen to see how the drive performed over FireWire 800 in comparison with the GDrive (left), and so we loaded them up. The drivers have the biggest effect on USB 2 performance, but should still boost FireWire 800. Our tests showed that the My Passport matched the GDrive, and was significantly faster than the Helium. It read random 256K blocks at 23MB/sec and wrote them at 37MB/sec.

At £188 for 500GB, the My Passport is excellent value. We prefer it to the Helium because it has FireWire 400 and 800, and is 50% bigger in terms of disk capacity. If you need the protection offered by the GDrive, it's worth paying for, otherwise this My Passport offers plenty for the money.