When it comes to advances in hard drives, capacity is typically the benchmark by which most improvements are measured. Keeping in tune with this philosophy, Western Digital today announced its first 2 TB portable hard drive designed exclusively for Macs.
The new My Passport Studio will maintain the same Mac aesthetic and features as previous models, except now it will pack an enormous capacity of 2 TB. To give some perspective on just how huge that is, 2 TB can hold either 400,000 photos, 240 hours of video, or 500,000 songs – or any combination thereof. Regardless of whether you're a casual Mac user or a professional photographer, videographer, or graphic artist, this will very likely be the only portable hard drive that you'll ever need to purchase, or at least for a very, very long time.
Other than its massive capacity and higher MSPR of $299.99, fans of the original My Passport Studio will be happy to hear that this new iteration will be virtually indistinguishable from its predecessors in terms of design and features. Users can once again expect a pocket-sized drive decked out in a sleek, all-metal chassis constructed out of anodized aluminum that shares the Mac aesthetic.
The new Passport will again be housed in a primarily black casing enveloped with a silver aluminum trim along the outer edges. The features will remain essentially the same, so the new drive will support a USB 2.0 interface and come with two FireWire 800 ports that can be daisy-chained with other FireWire-equipped peripherals, like other hard drives or HD camcorders.
Just like other Western Digital portable drives designed for Macs, the new My Passport Studio will once again come formatted for HFS+, the native Mac OS file system, so it can be used right out of the box with Apple Time Machine. The New My Passport Studio can be purchased at the WD store online and at select retailers.
