There’s an old saying amongst hard drive users: “Oh crap, it’s dead.” Well, it’s either that or “Aaaaaaaaaargh!”

I recently experienced a crash of sorts that wiped out all the data on my hard drive and corrupted the operating system installation, so I just had a dead computer. Fortunately, I had just bought a My Passport Studio to back up all of my Mac’s data via Time Machine, so the $200 purchase paid for itself pretty much instantaneously. There’s really not all that much to review in a hard drive without getting more technical, and bits and bytes sound more like ice cream than data to me anyway. However, I can talk about how the Studio looks and feels and generally functions, which is awesome, by the way.

Please ignore the strange reflection on the WD logo. It doesn't look like that.

Form Factor

The Studio is encased in a silver-painted plastic shell that’s just solid enough to not feel cheap. The hard drive features a little sliding door that also functions as a capacity gauge when the drive is plugged in. The entire package is light, and rubberized feet keep it from sliding around on a desk.

Power and Ports and really short wires

The Studio features two ports: one for mini-USB and one fore Firewire 800. Because my MacBook has a Firewire port already, I’ve been using that as my primary connection to the hard drive — and let me tell you, it’s fast! It’s so fast that I now look down and giggle at my USB thumb drives whenever I use them. Firewire transfers 3GB in about three minutes, whereas USB 2.0 via the mini-USB port seems to take about 7-10 minutes. It’s a big difference, and I can see why power users would want FireWire for large file transfers.

As for the wires, the Studio comes with a FireWire 800 cable, a Firewire 400 -> 800 adapter cable (for older Macs), and a USB<->Mini-USB cable. The problem here is that the cables all feel quite short, and I’m considering getting some sort of retractable Firewire 800 cable (if it even exists).

What I really love about the Studio, though, is the fact that it doesn’t need a stinking external power supply. This absolutely sealed the deal for me, since I already liked the look of the whole enclosure and was curious about FireWire 800.

My Usage

Admittedly, I’m doing a bit of a no-no with my hard drive. The Studio comes formatted HFS+ (Mac-only, though you can format the drive to play with Windows, too), but I’ve also made a separate partition on it to hold my media. This means that all my data and media are on one hard disk, but I just can’t be bothered (or afford) to have two separate backup discs at this time. I may pick up a Time Machine Capsule (for wireless backups) at a later date, but this solution will do just fine for now.

Bottom line

Having never bought my own hard drive enclosure before, I don’t exactly have any experiences to reference or any great way to judge the quality of the product (but you’ve gotta start somewhere). All I know is that the Studio is the first hard drive I’ve seen that looks great, runs off of FireWire 800 or USB, and features half a terabyte of storage space. It also matches my Mac and is formatted HFS+ right out of the box, so it doesn’t get much more plug n’ play than that.

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You can find the WD MyPassport Studio at almost all big retailers. I bought mine at BestBuy.ca, but Amazon.com would be a decent place to start in the US.

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