WD unveils new My Books with e-paper, while My Passport shrinks even further
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted Oct 6th 2009 10:23AM
posted Oct 6th 2009 10:23AM
Good news for hardcore portable storage buffs: looks like Western Digital is taking a hint from Verbatim and putting an e-paper display on its My Book Elite and My Book Studio portable hard drives, offering the device's label and free space up-front, perfect for those of us juggling multiple portable storage devices. In addition, both offer WD SmartWare, 256-bit hardware-based encryption, and are available in capacities ranging from 500GB to 2TB. My Book Studio (formatted for Mac and sportin' a FireWire 800 interface) ranges from $149.99 to $299.99 depending on size, while My Book Elite (with a USB 2.0 interface and NTFS formatting) will run you anywhere from $169.99 to $279.99.
If what you're looking for however, is the company's "smallest drive to date," check out My Passport Elite. Featuring a USB dock, illuminated capacity gauge, a secure "drive lock" indicator, and that 256-bit hardware-based encryption, this bad boy is sports up to 640GB storage (which will run you $169.99). This one is available in one of three "metallic" colors -- Metallic Red, Metallic Blue, or Charcoal Metallic. Sadly, the company hasn't yet teamed up with MusicSkins for a Metallica skin -- but our fingers are crossed.
Read - My Book Studio
Read - My Book Elite
Read - My Passport Elite
If what you're looking for however, is the company's "smallest drive to date," check out My Passport Elite. Featuring a USB dock, illuminated capacity gauge, a secure "drive lock" indicator, and that 256-bit hardware-based encryption, this bad boy is sports up to 640GB storage (which will run you $169.99). This one is available in one of three "metallic" colors -- Metallic Red, Metallic Blue, or Charcoal Metallic. Sadly, the company hasn't yet teamed up with MusicSkins for a Metallica skin -- but our fingers are crossed.
Read - My Book Studio
Read - My Book Elite
Read - My Passport Elite
Very nice looking, but for a $150-$300 hard drive eSATA is not something I would consider optional.
+1
Especially since the old MyBook Studio-series had it. eSATA is quite necessary for anything that's not a Mac, and everything has it now - desktop, notebook etc...
Apple, where is e-Sata in my MBP?
Are you talking about the good kind of shrinkage or the bad kind?
This would be good to backup all my porn
You sure you can afford to buy that many of these? You'd need what, 10, 11, TB? :P
Seems like a huge price increase on those desktop drives just for that display. Can anyone justify paying that much more for something so insignificant?
i will buy 1 in the summer when the price drops to 200
Is that really an E-ink display? Looks an awfull lot like a traditional old LCD display, which can be on for a long time but not indefinetaly. Of course if the LCD screen runs out of juice because you dont plug the hard drive in often enough, then you probably didnt need a portable hard drive in the first case.
i thought e-ink is easier on the eyes if you look at it constantly like when you read a book and is a lot more expensive than an monochrome lcd of a comparable size.Unless you love staring at your hard drive for hours together,whats the point of this e-ink display??
Zero power consumption. You can label and see your drives' remain space without using a sticker/label and a pen. Cool? Sure. Worth the premium? To some.
I dint know that so thanks for correcting me :) .....and thanks a ton for not sounding like a smug bastard like so many others here:)
It works when there's no power. The drive's contents and capacity can only change when it's powered, so the display doesn't need to update itself when it's unplugged, just keep showing the same old thing. Thus, e-ink is ideal.
Gotcha.....
Hope the throughput has improved.
I own a MyBook World Edition 1TB.
Despite the gigabit interface it will only pass 3.5MB/s. Thats 1/3 of a 100Mbit interface, never mind gigabit.
It looks good, runs linux and everything but its SLOW and USELESS.
Unless you dont mind waiting 2 hours to copy a DVD to that thing.
None of these is a NAS so ethernet speed is not a problem here.I seriously wish they specified the HDD rpm of such devices though.
All of the new WD hard drives don't "offer" WD SmartWare, it's written to the firmware and completely unremovable. Everytime you plug it in, it launches a virutual CD application that cannot be uninstalled unlease you choose to install their backup software. This is especially annoyinh on a mac if you're planning on using time machine.
I'm boycotting WD until they remove this forceware from their drives.
I don't get SmartWare anyway. How hard is it to drag-and-drop files? That's how I do my backups at least.
My Passport Elite? There's nothing elite about a drive that is USB 2.0 only and probably only 5400 RPM (since they don't mention any speed on their spec page).
With Seagate you get a portable drive, USB 2.0, Firewire 400 and FW 800 spinning up to 7200 RPM. And it fits in your pocket, requiring no external power source and runs only $160.
Hopefully the idiot designers decided to make the SATA port holes larger. Stupid me purchased two of their previous models and both of them had to have the SATA ports enlarged in order to stick a cable into it and have it run reliably.
The more e-ink things they make, the better and cheaper they get. So, as far as I am concerned, put e-ink everywhere you can and make it cheaper than LCDs as fast a possible.
Any word on availability?
Yeah the Studio model for mac is sold out on all capacities. All other vendors have the non-e-ink old model. Sadness.
Gonna have to wait until the retailers get filled in.
I was looking at the Studio for Mac on the WD website too. I think "sold out" means "not in stock yet", hence my curiosity about availability.
Why no Firewire 400? At one time, they had a "Home" version that had USB, Firewire, and eSATA, that was a great package. But none of the external HD manufacturers seem to be continuing Fireware 400.
It's a shame, Firewire 400, despite the theoretical limits, is still much faster than USB in every day use.