WD USB 3.0 Drive Goes For Mobile Photogs

By Greg Tarr On Apr 4 2011 - 4:01am

LAKE FOREST, CALIF. — Almost a year after the first USB 3.0 PCI cards and motherboards started to appear in the market, Western Digital recently started shipping a series of highcapacity hard disk drives that make use of the high data-rate interface.

Among the highlights of the line for photographers is the ultra-portable My Passport Essential SE series featuring a compact pocket-sized design that is ideal as a mobile storage platform for traveling lensmen, among other users. Versions are available in 500GB, 750GB and 1TB capacities, and a variety of color options.

As the name implies, the drive was tailor-made for portability. It fits in a jacket or pants pocket and is powered solely by the MicroUSB 3.0 connection to the PC, requiring no wall plugs or adapters.

It is encased in a smooth rounded plastic hard shell, with the USB connector positioned as the only port on the device.

The 1TB drive tested stores a ton of photos in any format, in addition to music, movies or data files, and can alternately be used as a hard drive backup for a laptop, notebook or even a desktop PC using the supplied backup software.

As with all of its hard drives, Western Digital installs on the drive its WD SmartWare software with automatic backup functionality. It’s relatively easy to set up and get started, though at 1TB it still requires a somewhat long backup processing time depending on how much data is involved.

The software was designed as a backup tool for emergency data restoration, so files are archived in compressed form and not easily accessible for everyday access.

To access files archived using the SmartWare will require going through a somewhat lengthy retrieval process to uncompress data. That’s probably something you are not going to want to do on a regular basis, so files that will be frequently accessed from the device are best stored without the SmartWare, uncompressed, or in compressed form using a common ZIP program.

The beauty of the My Passport Essential 1TB drive is the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface offering what Western Digital said is three times of speed of similar USB 2.0 devices. The drive is also powered by the USB connection, unlike devices based on similarly speedy eSATA or Ethernet ports, giving it easy plug-and-play connectivity.

The SuperSpeed USB 3.0 spec supports a data rate of 4,800Mbps (about 572MBps), and the PC connector end is backward compatible with USB 2.0. A special micro port is found on the hard drive, requiring the use of the supplied USB 3.0-cable or similarly compatible thirdparty USB 3.0 cable supporting the new wiring standard and full duplex operation.

Western Digital includes a 16-inch MicroUSB 3.0 cable with the drive, which is a bit short to reach around behind many desktop PCs, but third-party replacements are not common yet and still somewhat pricey, so guard it with your life.

As for the practical advantages of the USB 3.0 port, a simple test using the HD Tune utility found only a slightly faster transfer speed in a head-to-head matchup against a several-year-old USB 2.0 80GB HP PD0800 Pocket Media Drive.

But while the WD drive didn’t exactly blow the doors off the HP drive in speed, it made up significant points in size, storage capacity and price.

Moving a 5.12GB sample of photo, movie and music files from a several-months-old Windows 7 USB 3.0-ready gaming PC to the My Passport Essential SE took approximately 3.35 minutes. Moving the same sample to HP Pocket Media Drive over USB 2.0 ports took 4.25 minutes.

That’s probably not enough of a reason in itself to replace a functional USB 2.0 drive, but at a mere $160 suggested retail (as low as $100 street), it makes little sense to go for anything but a USB 3.0 unit like the My Passport Essential, even if you don’t have the supporting PC hardware. This way the drive will be forward compatible with your next PC, yet it will still work over the USB 2.0 ports on your current machine.