Western Digital My Passport Edge

The Western Digital My Passport Edge ($99.99 list) fulfills a niche: ready-to-go pocket hard drives. As such, it comes in one flavor: a 500GB drive with a USB 3.0 interface. The line is built on a simpler premise: This hard drive is meant to be a convenience item to be purchased with very little effort. And that concept pretty much works. Instead of having to agonize over color choices and capacities, it's the hard drive to recommend to your friends or relatives when they "just need a hard drive."

Design and Features
The My Passport Edge is a compact, pocket-sized drive measuring about 0.5 by 3.25 by 4.5 inches (HWD), which makes it a little shorter than an iPhone 4S, a smidge wider, and almost as thin. It's thinner, but otherwise about the same size as other recent My Passport drives like the Western Digital My Passport Studio (2TB) ($299.99 list, 4 stars) and Western Digital My Passport (2TB) ($249.99 list, 3.5 stars). The drive is made mostly of matte black polycarbonate plastic, with a thin metal lid with the drive's name and a dot-based design printed on it. One edge houses the drive's USB 3.0 micro-b connector. The drive comes with a USB 3.0 cable, so it's ready to use right out of the box. There's a three-year warranty, which is better than some competitors like the Editor's Choice Seagate Backup Plus , which makes do with a two-year warranty. Both warranties are better than more basic drives that come with a one-year warranty.

The drive comes formatted for NTFS, to work with Windows systems. You can reformat the drive as HFS+ for use with a Mac, plus the drive comes with a set of Mac and Windows utilities. The drive comes with WD's SmartWare (an easy to use backup utility), WD Security (simple hardware encryption), and WD Drive Utilities (diagnostics and sleep timer). Really, if you're not planning on setting up automatic backup on Windows, you don't have to use any of the included utilities. The drive is also ready to go (after a reformat) as a Time Machine backup disk for Macs. The drive's 500GB capacity is certainly enough to backup most laptops and ultrabooks. The drive can also be used as a quick way to transfer large multi-GB files between computers.

Performance
The My Passport Edge is a speedy drive, par for the course. It took a scant 16 seconds to copy our standard 1.2GB test folder over USB 3.0. We also gained good scores on the PCMark 5 (6,158 points) and PCMark 7 (1,536 points) hard drive tests. This compared well to the current Editor's Choice for portable hard drives, the Seagate Backup Plus (which scored 6,463 on PCMark 05 and 1,498 on PCMark 7). The larger capacity My Passport (2TB) was also in the same ballpark (6,106 on PCMark 05). Essentially, if you have a USB 3.0 equipped laptop or desktop, all three choices will be speedy, much speedier than USB 2.0, which takes over forty seconds to copy the same folder on all three drives.

The Western Digital My Passport Edge is a good hard drive, and will serve you well if you get one. It's fast, and it has a good warranty. However, the Seagate Backup Plus has an interchangeable interface, which is a better choice for techie users who need to use other interface like FireWire or Thunderbolt. The Seagate also has a better dollar per GB ratio: the My Passport costs 20 cents a GB, while the Seagate is about 14 cents per GB. It's even better when you realize that some online merchants are selling the Seagate for the same $99.99 price as the My Passport Edge. Though the My Passport Edge has a better warranty, the Seagate Backup Plus still holds on to its portable hard drive Editors' Choice award due to its better bang for the buck. That said, if you're a tech savvy person who needs to convince her tech brain-dead relative to backup their files, the My Passport Edge is a stress-free recommendation you can give without hesitation.

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt (HD-PA1.0TU3) with several other hard drive side by side.

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