Review: Western Digital hard drive Essential for MacBook Air owners
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
May 7, 2008 at 5:20pm
If you have a MacBook Air and are going on a trip (or—wonder of wonders—using the laptop as you only Mac), an essential item (pun intended) is a My Passport Essential Portable USB Drives from Western Digital. The 5400 RMP drives are light (less than five ounces), reasonably priced and easy to stow and to use.
Since the “world’s thinnest laptop”comes with, at best, a miserly 80GB hard drive, you’ll probably only keep your essential files on the Air’s hard drive or solid state drive. If you want to carry along non-essential items (videos, music, lots of photos, etc.) you’ll need extra storage. That’s where the My Passport Essential Drive is handy. It requires no power adapter, as it’s powered directly through the USB cable.
The drives seem to be very rugged, and they look good. Recently, the My Passport Essential Portable USB Drives got a splash of color when WED introduced 10 new colors for them: brilliant orange, super sunny yellow, raindrop blue, arctic white, deep viola, cherry red, ultra mint, real red, intense blue, and vibrant pink. (My favorite is raindrop blue.)
The WD drives aren’t, of course, for MacBook Airs only. They work fine with all Apple laptops and desktops. However, with their svelte size and generous capacity, the MacBook Air seems to be the most natural fit.
The My Passport Essential Portable USB Drives are equipped with sync and encryption software for file transfer. Unfortunately, the backup software is for Windows only. And the drive’s capacity gauge also only works with the Microsoft operating system.
Otherwise, My Passport Essential Portable USB Drives work—and work well—with Mac OS X 10.4.10 or higher. They’re available at select retail stores and from WD’s online store. My Passport Essential USB Drives are offered in capacities of 160GB, 250GB and 320GB. The manufacturer’s suggested retail price is US$119.99, $149.99 and $179.99, $149.99, respectively.
Macsimum rating: 8 out of 10.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
