WD updates My Passport Studio drives for Macs
updated 09:45 am EST, Mon March 1, 2010
WD My Passport Studio get e-paper display
WD on Monday introduced the My Passport Studio portable drives formatted for Macs. Like the desktop-sized My Books, the 2.5-inch disks sport e-paper displays that show information even when the drive is not powered. The Studios also have a fast FireWire 800 interface, a USB 2.0 port and 256-bit hardware-based encryption.
The company promises support for Time Machine Backups, although automatic and continuous backups are still an option through the included WD SmartWare program. The e-paper label displays remaining capacity and the drive's lock status, but can otherwise be personalized with unique messages.
The My Passport Studio can be had in 320GB, 500GB and 640GB capacities, with prices ranging from $150 to $200.
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Joined: Mar 2008
Do they still have freezing problems?
The biggest problem with My Passport Studio drives has been their going to sleep when transferring larges amounts of data. This causes the drive and the Finder and drive-dependent applications to FREEZE. The drive enclosure has a bug which puts it to sleep when doing large transfers.
As far as I know, currently, WD has no firmware update that fixes this problem.
This is a huge problem since it can cause data loss when doing backups.
It also makes WD drives enclosures - not the drives themselves - unreliable.