Have disk, will travel
Remember the tag line for the original
iPod? ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’ – it seemed impressive at the time. But if
you used this WD Passport to house MP3 files, you could stick half a million of
them on it and still slip it into your pocket. Alternatively, you could use it
to store 450 DVDs or 40 dual-layer Bluray discs. It is, in other words, an
awful lot of storage. Enough, in fact, to use the drive as a Time Machine
destination on a fully specced iMac or a couple of MacBook Pros.
WD
My Passport Studio 2TB
Aesthetically, the 2TB Studio is identical
to the 1TB version we reviewed in November (MacUser, 11 November 2011, p30),
except for one feature: it’s a couple of millimeters thicker. The black and
silver aluminium casing still looks great and means the drive is tough enough
to withstand being knocked about in a laptop bag. And the tiny rubber feet on
its base mean it won’t slide off your desk should you knock it inadvertently.
Around the back there are two FireWire 800 ports so you can you sit the drive
in the middle of a chain, and a USB 2 socket. Both interfaces will supply
enough power to obviate the need for a separate power supply.
2TB
of storage in your pocket makes the My Passport Studio attractive to
photographers, musicians and other creative pros
The Studio 2TB is formatted as HFS+ and
comes with two utilities, which are housed in a disk image on the drive. WD
Drive Utilities is a suite of tools that enables you to perform diagnostic
tests, erase and format the drive, and set it to sleep after a specified period
of inactivity. WD Security allows you to enable hardware encryption and set a
password. We like the ability to auto-unlock for a specified users account.
We tested the My Passport Studio using
Quick Bench 4 and found it recorded a read speed for 20MB files of 34.8Mbit/
sec and a write speed of 63.5Mbit/sec over FireWire 800. By comparison, the 1TB
version recorded a read rate of 69Mbit/sec and a write rate of 54Mbit/sec for
the same size of file. The significant difference in read speeds is curious,
and rather disappointing.
The
WD Studio has two FireWire 800 ports, so you can daisychain the drive
Slow read speed aside, the 2TB My Passport
Studio is a decent portable drive. It’s robust, lokks nice and comes with a
good software suite. If you can find it for around $300, as we did, it’s a
worthwhile purchase. At WD’s own retail price - $418.5 as MacUser went to press
– we’d want better performance.
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Details
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Price
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$300
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From
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dabs.com
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Info
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wdc.com
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Pro
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huge capacity * FireWire 800 and USB 2 *
good software suite
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Con
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slow read speed * expensive
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Rating
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3/5
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