Western Digital My Passport Studio

Western Digital's Passport drives had the fastest data transfer speed until
the new generation drives from Seagate and Transcend overtook it. Now Western
Digital has introduced its upgraded line, called Passport Studio.

Passport Studio has a silver plastic body with a slide protector for ports.
Just next to the ports are 4 LEDs for usage indication. The drive comes with the
standard mini USB and a FireWire 800 port and three separate cables for
connection via USB/ FireWire variants. One thing that was quite noticeable was
that the Studio drive was thicker than its predecessor and even the Seagate
Freeagent Go (thanks to the thicker 2.5” 500 GB drive).

We tested the Studio passport using our standard benchmarks for hard drives
via FireWire. In HD-Tach the drive gave an average transfer speed of 36MB/s and
in Everest Disk Benchmark it gave a read speed of 40 MB/s which is truly
impressive. What impressed us further was that it took just 55 seconds to
transfer 1.2 GB of data. When tested using USB 2.0, the data transfer speed was
just about half of that via FireWire. Compared to other drives we tested, this
one is just right to take full advantage of the FireWire standard and with USB
it stands right next to the fastest drives available. However, the Studio is
priced significantly higher than other drives of the same capacity.

Bottom Line: Overall, the Asus P5Q Pro is a powerful
and a power efficient motherboard.