YOU CAN TAKE IT WITH YOU
Western Digital
We tested all three versions
of Western Digital’s 500GB external drive, the My Passport
Essential, Elite, and Studio—and each had something going for it.
First, these drives were the top USB performers in their category. If
you don’t care about Fire Wire performance, these are the speediest
USB hard drives.
The Essential, as its name euphemistically suggests, is the bare
bones, USB-only version of the drive. Its case design is simple but
not simplistic, with clean lines that don’t look out of place next to a
Mac. While our test unit came in MacBook Pro-compatible silver, the
Essential is available in a variety of colors. It has a single, exposed mini-USB connector, with the drive’s status LED right next to it, and four
rubber feet to keep it from sliding around on a desk.
The Elite is slim like the Essential, but has a sliding door over its
mini-USB connector. The open door also contains the status LEDs. For
Windows users, the Elite provides additional software for backing up
and syncing, which obviously doesn’t recommend it to the Mac-using
populace. WD touts the “soft touch” finish of the Elite, and while it
feels a tiny bit softer to the touch, it didn’t do much for us. However,
since this finish is grippier, WD eliminated the rubber feet found on
the Essential and Studio. We liked the sliding door that offers added
production to the USB connector, but whether the drive’s price
difference compared to its simpler sibling is worthwhile will depend on
your budget.
From a capacity and performance perspective, the WD drives we
tested were largely the same. The Studio is Western Digital’s top-of-the-line offering and is aimed squarely at Mac users. It has Fire Wire
HARD DRIVES (cont.)
500GB MY PASSPORT
ESSENTIAL
Western Digital www.wdc.com Price: $199.99
Requirements: USB port
Fastest USB performer.
USB only.
GREAT55
500GB MY PASSPORT ELITE
Western Digital www.wdc.com Price: $219.99
Requirements: USB port
Fastest USB performer. Sliding USB cover.
USB only.
GREAT55
500GB MY PASSPORT
STUDIO
Western Digital www.wdc.com Price: $249.99
Requirements: USB, Fire Wire 400, and/or
Fire Wire 800 ports
Fastest USB performer.
Poor Fire Wire performer. Thick case.
GREAT55
400 and 800 and USB ports, and is therefore somewhat thicker than
the other two My Passport models. It comes preformatted as a Mac
drive and has a sliding door similar to that on the Elite. Unfortunately,
in our testing the Studio was nearer the rear of the pack both for
Fire Wire 400 and 800 performance, so the price difference for this
drive doesn’t really pay off.
Look at any spec sheet for a USB device and it will usually proclaim
that it supports high-speed USB 2.0 at up to 480 megabits
per second. Contrast that with Fire Wire, which comes in 400- and
800-megabits-per-second flavors, and you might assume that USB
performs somewhat better than the former and not as well as the latter.
Well, you’d be wrong, and we’ve got the test data to back it up.
Fire Wire was designed from the outset to provide high-performance
data transfer between devices, but at the cost of having to put more
intelligence inside each device, which raised per-device cost. USB, on the
other hand, was designed so that the external device could be built as
inexpensively as possible, leaving all the smarts inside the computer. This
decision, which puts much
of the transfer burden
on the computer rather
than the device, also
results in a measurable
loss of performance.
Most applications that use USB today—keyboards, mice, or audio
devices—don’t bump up against the USB performance ceiling. But USB
mass-storage devices, such as external hard drives, definitely do. As
our test results show, USB does the job, but it’s much slower than even
Fire Wire 400. This is particularly noticeable with the drives we tested that
have both Fire Wire and USB: USB lost the race every time.
It’s Got the Power. Back in the early days of Fire Wire, it had one
irrefutable benefit over USB: delivering enough power to keep a hard
disk going. Fire Wire can deliver up to 45 watts of power, which is plenty
to start a drive’s platters and keep them spinning. The USB spec, in
contrast, provides 500m W for so-called low-power devices and 2.5W for
so-called high-power devices. While 2.5W previously couldn’t power very
much, today’s laptop-grade drives are so thrifty with their electrons that
USB vs. FireWire—
Speed and Power
555+) M|L FEB•09 www.maclife.com
a USB port’s worth of electricity is enough to run a hard drive. Some
USB ports have had difficulty delivering enough juice and, as a result,
some drive manufacturers have taken to providing Y-cables with their
drives: One USB connector for both power and data, and a second to
supply an additional port of power. The downside is that this uses up two
USB ports on your computer—and many laptops these days only have
two to start with.
USB remains more ubiquitous than Fire Wire, and even Apple has
decided that unless you’re a MacBook Pro or Mac Pro owner, you don’t
need Fire Wire anymore, which is a shame, since the performance
difference is pretty significant.
USB 3.0 SuperSpeed and Future Fire Wire. Just as this article
was going to press, the USB Implementers Forum—the trade group
behind USB standards ( www.usb.org)—announced USB 3.0, aka USB
SuperSpeed. USB 3.0 is supposed to provide throughput of up to 4. 8
gigabits per second, a hefty 10x speed bump over the USB 2.0 spec. Not
only that, but USB 3.0 is also slated to deliver 10.8W of power, another
substantial increase. USB 1.0 and 2.0 devices will be backward-compatible
with USB 3.0 ports, which is good news for anyone who likes to keep their
older Macs and Mac peripherals around as long as possible.
In contrast, Fire Wire 1600 and 3200, which offer throughputs of 1. 6
and 3. 2 gigabits per second, respectively, were both approved as IEEE
standards in July 2008. Both of these higher speeds use the same
physical connector as Fire Wire 800, and are also backward-compatible.
It seems likely that Fire Wire 400 has reached the end of its life, and
while Fire Wire 800 looks to be significantly inferior to USB 3.0 on paper,
our experiences with USB 2.0 compared to Fire Wire 400 lead us to
reserve judgment on Fire Wire 1600’s and 3200’s viability until we can
compare them to the first real USB 3.0 devices, which are expected to
start shipping in late 2009 or early 2010.
