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.