Review: Western Digital My Passport Studio 1TB

The Western Digital My Passport Studio 1TB is a pocket-sized portable hard drive and is well designed and robust.

Eschewing Western Digital's book-shaped plastic casing, the latest My Passport Studio drive is all metal, with a brushed aluminium chassis and matt black lid. It looks fantastic and doesn't pick up fingerprints.

The version we're reviewing here is 1TB in capacity, and offers both FireWire 800 and USB connectivity. Like all FireWire 800 drives it can also be connected to a FW400 port, but you have to supply your own lead or adapter.

Perhaps surprisingly, USB connectivity is through Micro-B USB, a standard that's becoming de rigueur for mobile phones, but is less common on hard drives.

A couple of applications are bundled. WD Drive Utilities lets you run diagnostics on the drive, set a sleep timer, wipe it clean and register your purchase. With WD Security, you can password-protect your data to keep it from prying eyes.

Unlike the 7200rpm Iomega eGo, the My Passport Studio 1TB uses a slower 5400rpm hard drive. This is reflected in our benchmarking tests' random average read/write speeds.

Using a FireWire 800 connection, the Western Digital drive gave us 7.905/14.822MB/s, and with USB, 7.623/12.365MB/s. These speeds are entirely acceptable, but can't match the eGo Portable HD Mac Edition's 7200rpm hard drive.

If you're likely to spend a lot of time copying large files to and from your portable hard drive, the Iomega eGo Portable HD Mac Edition might be worth the extra money. But for most users, the Western Digital My Passport Studio 1TB is the superior option.

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