Western Digital My Passport Edge USB 3.0 Review

The Western Digital My Passport Edge is one of the latest bus-powered USB 3.0 hard drives out there. There are both pre-formatted versions for the Mac and PC out there, currently priced at $99 and $89, respectively.

The case is an all aluminum design and is surprisingly slim for a spinning hard drive. At 500GB, it’s not really massive when you think about the 2TB WD Passport Studio bus-powered drives out there, but that’s still a whole lot of photos.

The drive is so small that it can easily fit in your front pocket.

The PC and Mac designs are slightly different – with the Mac version getting the silver bezel and the PC version sticking with an all-black look.

The biggest boon is to these drives is the speed in the small package. USB 3.0 is finally a reality for Mac users with the latest MacBook Pros, iMacs and Mac Minis offering USB 3.0 in addition to the much-pricier Thunderbolt interface.

The USB 3.0 interface delivers a punch to the read/write speed on this drive – hitting 117MB/s read and 116MB/s write speeds.

That’s better than we ever saw with FireWire 800 drives – thanks to the 5Gb/s throughput from the USB 3.0 interface.

The only real complaint that I have when compared to prior-generation FW800 drives is the lack of dual ports for daisy chaining drives, which is a feature that I still use daily on my collection of FW800 drives. I’m not sure if that’s possible on USB 3.0 hard drive interfaces though, so that may be wishful thinking on my part.

At $100 or less per pop, these little pocket-sized drives should have no problem finding their way into photographers’ travel kits. Highly recommended.

You can see more specs and features on the WD My Passport Edge 500GB drive on Western Digital’s website.  The My Passport Studio drives are available at B&H Photo.