Western Digital My Passport Elite review

At £80, the Western Digital My Passport Elite is one of the more expensive portable drives we've looked at this month - only the super-stylish LaCie, at £100, costs more.

The high price, though, does net you some intelligent design and a decent range of features. The design of the My Passport echoes the styling of Western Digital's desktop drives with a couple of curved corners, and the contrast of metallic silver and black works well. The warranty is excellent too.

The mini-USB port, which is the only interface on this device, is protected by a snappy sliding cover. And there's also a series of LEDs that indicate how much of this drive's 320GB capacity is being used. It's only accurate to 64GB, understandably, but still useful nonetheless.

The My Passport Elite is also eminently portable, coming in at less than 200g in weight, with only two other portable drives this month lighter. It's not too big either (at 80 x 126 x 15mm), so the My Passport Elite will easily fit into the average pocket.

The drive also returned some strong performance figures, although a handful of drives tested this month are still faster. Our single 50MB file transfer tests were both dispatched in under two seconds, and the more demanding multiple file tests were handled quickly too: just over eight seconds for writing the files to disk, and just under six seconds for reading them.

This is a superb option, then, if you want a portable drive that offers good performance in a stylish, well-featured package. Pick the Plextor if eSATA is needed, but the My Passport Elite is the best USB-only drive here and a worthy award winner.

Author: Mike Jennings