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- Automatic, continuous backup
- Formated in HFS + for the Mac
- Smart Display – Create your own personalized drive label to remind you what’s stored on each drive
- Password protection and 256-bit encryption
- FireWire 800/400 and USB 2.0 interface
Product Description
WD’s ultra-portable, My Passport Studio drive is packed with innovative features including a customizable e-label to remind you what’s stored on the drive. Formatted for Mac and compatible with Apple Time Machine, this drive is plug-and-play ready for Mac computer users. WD SmartWare enables automatic, continuous backup with visual display. FireWire 800 provides fast data access and saves.
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- Western Digital My Book Studio 2 TB USB 2.0/FireWire 400/800, Desktop External Hard Drive WDBAAJ0020HSL-NESN
- Western Digital My Passport for Mac 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive WDMEA5000AN
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If you’re a Mac user or, like me, use both Macs and PCs then you know that portable hard drives still come in two flavors – those that are Mac ready and those that are PC ready. If you want a PC ready drive with Firewire capability you’re still out of luck but this Western Digital offering is much closer to plug and play that previous offerings.
I have two of these drives. The first I use at work with a Mac and the setup was as easy as advertised. Just plug it in and it works. The second I use at home with a PC and that’s a little tricky. I wanted the FireWire option (if the coolest PCs only have so many USB ports) so I was willing to put up with some hassle for the functionality. Here’s what you need to do on a Windows 7 PC:
Plug in the drive
Click on the start button
Go to Computer and right click
Select Manage (you’ll need admin rights)
On the Computer Management screen select Disk Management (under Storage)
My Studio will be listed as not initialized. It won’t have a drive letter.
Right click on the My Studio disk and select Initialize
Then Right click again and select format. Make sure to format for NTFS.
Since you’re only partitioning and not really formatting the drive this will only take a minute or two to complete. Then you’re ready to go. That’s a big improvement over other drives such as the otherwise fine Iomega FireWire drive that requires a full formatting.
The digital read out on the front of the drive lets you label it and see how much space you have left. This is a great feature if you use multiple hard drives like I do. The only downside it that this feature seems to be the reason this My Studio drive is almost twice as thick as WD’s My Passport drive with the same GB size. Both are highly portable but I’m not sure this feature is worth the additional bulk.
The only bad thing about this drive – and it’s the reason this is a 4 star instead of a 5 – is the horrendous ironically named “WD SmartWare” backup software. The virtual CD can be unmounted now but it is still an unnecessary intrusion. The software itself eats up more RAM than anything else running on my PC. More than Explorer. More than Microsoft Office Suite. All that for limited backup functionality – you can only access backed up files through a full restore. You need to install “SmartWare” to turn off the virtual CD, label the drive and register it even if you don’t want to use the drive for back up. Then it just sits on your computer eating up memory and CPU speed. The only fix is to go to Windows Control Panel and uninstall the software. This is Western Digital’s Achilles Heel and they need to get it fixed.
Rating: 4 / 5
This device is designed for people who want a back-up system that comes ready to use with its own backup and file-keeping software, and even a minimal display. It requires OS 10.4 or higher to run most of those features, without which it’s only an ordinary external hard drive. Most Mac users are running 10.4 or higher, but for the few other troglodytes like me, here’s my experience using it with my older operating system. (I prefer to keep using 10.3.9 because it’s amazingly stable. I use my PowerBook a lot, everyday, but I only restart it on rare occasions, every few months. It never crashes, even with dozens of windows open and many programs running.)
The drive can also be used on a PC, with the included software, with Windows 7 or later. It comes preformatted for the Mac, so for a PC you’d need to start by reformatting it, which is simple to do.
If you don’t know what operating system you have on your Mac, you can find out by clicking on the apple in the upper left corner and selecting About This Mac on the menu. If you have 10.4 or higher, you should be able to use the software that comes preloaded on the drive (though people give that software mixed reviews). If you have an earlier version (lower number), there’s no point to installing the included software. Instead you can do one of two things. One, if you only want to back up or store selected files, you can just plug in the drive and drag and drop files onto the external drive icon. Or, two, if you want to back up your entire hard drive, maybe even make a bootable copy, you can download some third-party software to do that.
If you’re using 10.3.x or earlier, your computer is probably old enough to need one of the adapters included with the drive. Most of the old Macs had FireWire 400, for which an adapter is included. If you don’t have FireWire, you might be able to use the USB adapter, but it will be very slow if you only have USB 1.0. (Not that you’ll have any faster options.)
I wanted to back up my entire hard drive, so I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), the earlier version that works with OS 10.2-10.3. It’s available for free online. It will create a bootable clone of your hard drive, which you can use to start and run your computer if your internal hard drive crashes, or you can also choose to make a nonbootable copy, which is a little faster. The process is automatic once you start it. Using CCC and the FireWire 400 adapter, it took a little over 90 minutes to back up over 70 gigabytes.
That worked well enough, with a couple minor glitches. CCC stalled when it was almost done, so I quit it, restarted it and copied the last couple folders. (You can tell if the drive has stopped copying files by looking at the status light, which blinks fast when operating.) The other glitch is that the virtual CD that mounts automatically on the desktop with the preloaded software won’t unmount when I drag it to the trash or click eject on a finder window. No big deal. Just make sure the drive isn’t operating and drag its icon to the trash or select eject for it before you disconnect it, and don’t worry about the warning message about the virtual software CD. There are instructions to keep the software from mounting if it bothers you.
The drive operates noiselessly, with only barely perceptible vibration, getting warm but not hot.
Western Digital has free email help. I tried it, asking if they had any recommendation for third-party software for my older Mac, and got a response in less than a day (they had no recommendations).
To recap, this drive is designed for people wanting a prepackaged backup system, everything included, for those with OS 10.4 or later. It will work fine for those with other Mac operating systems too, but without the prepackaged software.
Rating: 4 / 5
You will have to decide if the premium pricing of this 500GB model is worth it. The premium price gets additional features and a longer warranty. I believe the premium price is worth the extra warranty alone. I have had other portable hard drives fail.
As the details state on Amazon the drive does come formatted as HFS+ for the Mac user. If you are a windows user you will need to activate the drive and format it after you have plugged it into the USB port.
The design is nice and sleek with silver on the top and bottom and white around the side. It comes with a Firewire 800 cable,firewire 800 to 400 connector and the Usb mini-b connector. The cables are fairly short but are usable.
I did my testing on a Windows Vista Computer. When you first plug in the hard drive a virtual CD drive is created that points to a small partition on the hard drive, which contains the WD SmartWare software. Yes some people will not like the fact that a small partition is being used to run the Virtual CD. This does not bother me so I have not docked any stars for this
If you are using windows computer the drive will not be recognized until it is activated and formated. With the WD SmartWare software your able to change the e-label on the hard drive, setup the backup schedule, update your software, run diagnostics, and set the password for the hardware based encryption. The hardware based encryption is biggest selling point to me. It uses 256 bit encryption, which is not competely unbreakable but would be very difficult to perform a brute force attack against. So if you lose your hard dirve you can feel safe about the data that is on it is well protected. I do recommend when setting the password that you use mix-case, numbers, and specials characters. Make sure you do not forget the password because you will lose your data on the drive.
Performance of the drive is what one would expect when using the USB cable. Nothing stellar but more than useable. It took around two hours to perform my first backup of about 80GB of data. Thw WD SmareWare software scans your computer and seperates the different file types into groups (Music, Pictures, Videos, etc) It displays the total space each file type is using on your computer drive. As you backup your data a progress indicator is displayed. You can also setup the back for versioning of files. The default is set for 5 versions. In addition, the space available on the hard drive is displayed on the e-label. The e-label on the hard drive is definitely a big selling point. You get to provide your own label. It only allowed me to enter 4 characters not sure if it designed this way but it displayed videos 09 when taking it out of the box. It also displays how much space is left and whether you have the locked the hard drive with the hardware encryption.
The hard drive has a 3 year warranty, which is not as good as some Seagates that have a 5 year warranty but is better than many of the cheaper 500gb hard drives that have only 1 year warranty.
At this time I cannot comment on the reliability because I have not owned it long enough but I can comment on a past experience.
My first experience with a portable western digital hard drive was the 120GB passport model. I still have it but hardly use it anymore. I also had to RMA it after about 3 months light use because the drive failed. I do not trust my data on the 120GB and had switched to Seagate.
Pros
Sleek Design
E-Label Indicator
Hardware Encryption
File Versioning in the backup
3 Year Warranty
Cons
Premium Price (You get what you pay for though)
Cables a little on the short side.
I gave it 5 stars because I believe WD has really nailed it with this drive. As long as the drive is reliable they have definitely have hit a home run here. I will update my review in the future if the reliablilty changes
Update 5/16/2010 – Just a quick update. It is continuing to perform without any issues. Granted it does not leave the desk. I use my Seagate 250GB when traveling
I would definitely recommend this drive to my friends and family.
Rating: 5 / 5
I received the 500 GB version of this drive from WD after a month-long exchange over problems with the WD3200MT I initially bought (older generation drive, Passport III; see my review there), which froze during heavy writes over Firewire 800. I tested this drive thoroughly after I received it to make sure it didn’t have the same problem, and it does not. The performance I measured was 36-55 MiB/sec sustained write (inner to outer tracks), 37-68 MiB/sec read. Compare to USB 2.0 that does not exceed 30 MiB/sec. Note that I did observe that after an hour of writing the data rate would drop to half, which I believe is a thermal-protection feature; it would remain slow for 30-60 minutes (presumably until it cooled down). I propped up the drive to improve cooling a little and modified my test to “rest” the drive periodically, and after that was able to write at high speeds until the disk was full. Inserting the “rests” added 25 minutes to the 2.5 hours it takes to fill the disk, so equates to an acceptably modest reduction in overall throughput (~17%) when you need to write for long periods of time. I tested a 30-second rest after each 10 GB of writing.
I’m happy with the drive’s performance (the most important thing on a Firewire drive in my opinion — otherwise save your money!), but don’t find the extras compelling. The Smartware software is okay but I can’t find a way to turn off the backup feature, meaning it periodically scans my main disk even if backup is not enabled (slowing it down), and it only supports the WD Passport drive, ignoring the other two WD drives I have connected to this machine at the moment (two previous-generation My Book drives, one Studio, one Home). Those use separate drivers, which is inconsistent and puzzling. Fortunately you can just uninstall Smartware, though the gauge on the LCD can’t update after that. I’m uncertain of the usefulness of the “virtual CD” feature, but it isn’t intrusive so I haven’t felt an urge to disable it. I haven’t yet tried the security features.
Aesthetically I think the drive looks better in person than in photos, though I still like the previous generation’s looks better. It came with white (to match the newer case), high-quality, short cables, which are exactly what I wanted. (Note that mine came from the RMA department so I don’t know exactly what comes with the retail package. I only got cables, no carrying case like I got with the retail version of the drive I originally bought, though they let me keep all of the stuff that came with other drive I bought.) With the previous generation black cables (to match the older case), the FW800 connectors were all plastic, the USB was mini, and the FW400-to-FW800 (M-M) was a separate cable. With the new generation, the FW800 cables have metal connectors, there is an adapter for FW400 (female FW800 to FW400, must use with the FW800 cable), and the USB is micro-B (I think).
Rating: 4 / 5
The enclosure is plastic, but it feels pretty solid. It’s much lighter and smaller than a larger 3.5″ portable hard drive and is powered by the firewire or USB cable–so no bulky power adapter is needed. The LCD display might seem superfluous, but it’s kind of handy. I got two of these drives–one for home/personal and one for work (thanks work!). The display makes it easy to differentiate between them. I have some mixed feelings about the built-in software. It comes with some “turbo” drivers for which purpose I don’t understand. The firewire 800 works great and I’m not a fan of installing lots of extra add-ons (so I didn’t). The built-in virtual CD software was a little annoying and took a bit of digging in the docs to figure out how to disable (but it is possible, and without reformatting or any other extreme measures). Works great with Time Machine. A solid little spare drive for Mac users!
Rating: 4 / 5