Conclusion

The Western Digital My Passport Studio is no ordinary portable hard disk drive. It sports a unique E-label that not only conveniently displays the drive usage and available free space, it can also be customized to display a descriptive label!

Security-conscious users will also appreciate the fact that this drive is one of the rare ones that support hardware encryption and a strong one at that. Should you lose the drive, you can rest assured that even the NSA will have a very hard time getting to your data!

The My Passport Studio is also one of the few portable hard disk drives to offer a faster interface, in addition to the ubiquitous but aging USB 2.0 interface. Its FireWire interface allowed it to deliver a throughput of 40 MB/s, and this was only because we could only test it using the FireWire 400 mode. It would have done much better in its native FireWire 800 mode.

You would think that a faster drive, and one that is chock full of extra features, would run hotter than "regular" portable hard disk drives. Well, it came as a surprise to us as well, but the Western Digital My Passport Studio is actually the coolest-running external drive we have ever tested! Even at full load, its maximum case temperature was just 7.8 °C above ambient temperature!

The only thing we didn't quite like about it was the fact that Western Digital chose to slice off about 370 MB of the drive's capacity to store the WD SmartWare suite of applications. Of course, they had good reasons for doing so, but they could have used less space or offered users the option to remove the Virtual CD partition and restore the drive to its maximum capacity.

Some users might find this drive a little thicker and heavier than other portable hard disk drives. However, this is a small price to pay for the features that Western Digital built into the My Passport Studio drive. In fact, we highly recommend this portable hard disk drive to non-Mac users, especially if you are the type who would appreciate the convenience of the E-label and the security of 256-bit hardware encryption. Why should Mac users have all the fun?

For the lowest current prices on Western Digital My Passport Studio hard disk drives, click here!

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