Portable hard drives have become the quint-essential accessory for a notebook user and with newer notebooks coming in with smaller but faster SSD drivers, the requirement for a large capacity drive to put your media and backups on is higher than ever. We take a look a quick look at one such product today- the WD My PassPort for Mac.

What makes this drive “for Mac” is the fact that it comes pre-formatted with HFS+ which is the native file system used by Macs. This means that you can pretty much plug this drive in any of the newer Macs and use it right away for reading and writing files as well as creating backups with Time Machine. Let me point out that any portable hard drive is capable of this but most of them come formatted with FAT32 or NTFS and need to be reformatted by your Mac to HFS+ which is just an extra step.

The other thing that makes this WD drive “for Mac” is, obviously, the design. It’s almost a pre-requisite for any Mac product to look good and My Passport does well but not necessarily great in this aspect. I like the minimal design but the plastic enclosure isn’t very Mac like. Also, I found the drive to be a tad bit chunky- especially when put next to the MacBook Air. However, this has more to do with the current level of technology than anything else. If you want something slimmer, you will have to settle for lower capacity for now.

My Passport for Mac has a pretty clean design with just one USB port and an LED next to it. WD bundles a USB cable with the drive along with warranty information. On the drive, WD bundles two applications that you can install on your Mac. WD Drive Utilities lets monitor the status of your hard drive using SMART as well as run diagnostics and quick tests along with erasing the drive. WD Security on the other hand password protects your hard drive. An update to both these utilities was available for download when I initially launched them which is good as it tells you that WD is keeping stuff up to date.

There’s not really much else that can be said about USB 2.0 portable drives. Their performance has been saturated by the speed of the USB 2.0 port and that holds true for My Passport for Mac as well which posted speeds of just under 40 MB/s in both read and write tests. While this is good enough for general reading and writing of files, expect to wait a while if you plan on moving high-definition movies to and from this drive. Initial Time Machine backup will also take a while but subsequent ones should be fast.

Priced at around AED 800, the WD My Passport for Mac is quite a bit on the pricey side- something Mac users are accustomed to. While it offers a decent design and plenty of storage, I see no reason why you cannot get one of the other, cheaper USB 2.0 alternatives even if it isn’t for the Mac and just format it in HFS+ and use it like this drive. The added utilities bundled with the drive don’t really add much value and can be found around the web for free.

Available in dark and light colors, the Hitachi LifeStudio Mobile Plus comes packaged neatly in a folded box which has the 2.5” portable hard drive with a dock along with a 4GB USB thumb drive. Also present inside the box is a USB cable, the LifeStudio application as well as Hitachi backup software. The drive is available in 320GB and 500GB capacities.

You’re probably wondering what is the use of the dock and the included thumb drive. In simplest terms, the dock houses the drive as well as the USB key and acts as a base for transferring data between these devices. Hitachi’s thinking is that you can carry the 4GB USB drive with you for portability reasons and fill it up with pictures and other media from your friends and then bring that back home and dock it to copy it over to the bigger sibling.

The included software does all of that, along with a few other tricks and is based on CoolIris that, as the name suggests, is an incredibly cool app for viewing and navigating. Its been available for browsers for quite some time now and has a dedicated following. Hitachi adds a few cool things- notably the ability to upload to Facebook, Flickr and Picasa directly from the LifeStudio application. Not only can upload photos from your computer to Facebook, but you can also leave comments without having to leave the LifeStudio interface.

Its time to revise this standard as well as you must have seen the limitations of bandwidth that USB2.0 offers in our Flash and Hard Drive tests of late that pretty much saturate the bus. Although USB 3.0 doesn’t offer a fortyfold speed increase from USB 2.0, it still offers a pretty decent jump at ten times the speed of the bus its succeeding. At 4.8Gbps or approximately 570 MB/s, USB 3.0 should satisfy most of the peripherals connected to it.

Now just like the original USB and USB 2.0, you’ll have to wait for a while if you want it supported natively by your chipset. Until that time, if you want to enjoy USB 3.0 speeds, you will need to get an add-on card for your computer or look for a Notebook/Desktop that offers this through an additional onboard controller. Buffalo was kind enough to send us their PCI Express based USB 3.0 add-on card for the desktop along with their 2.5” portable hard drive that is also USB 3.0 based.

Installing the Buffalo USB 3.0 PCI Express Interface Card was as easy as opening the chassis of your desktop PC, finding an empty PCI Express slot and connecting the four pin power adapter included in the package. Buffalo bundles a low profile backplate if you have a slim PC. Once the card was inside the computer, you simply pop-in the included CD to install the drivers and you’re all set.

The Buffalo MiniStation Lite USB 3.0 hard drive comes in a glossy black finish and looks very much like a standard USB hard drive except that the USB port looks a bit different. The new SATA 3.0 specification calls for a new connector which is a bit flatter but wider than the old connector. The other side of the connector is a standard flat USB connector so you don’t have to worry about backward compatibility- all USB 3.0 drives should work with USB 2.0 at the lower speed of USB 2.0.

With our testbed all set, we brought in the MiniStation Lite USB 3.0 Portable hard drive but first, we thought we’d benchmark it using a built-in USB 2.0 port on our desktop. The following is thr result of data throughput using a USB 2.0 interface for this drive.

Its seems pretty clear from the graph above that the MiniStation is saturating the USB port with a constant throughput of about 35 MB/s. Next, we powered this drive on the USB 3.0 plug on the Buffalo and here is what it looks like.

As you can see, there is a pretty big jump in the performance under USB 3.0 with the graph starting at 70 MB/s which is double of what you got from USB 2.0 and finishing off at around 35 MB/s. The Average Read performance for this drive under USB 3.0 was 54 MB/s which is a lot higher than 34 MB/s under USB 2.0

For those of you wondering how USB 3.0 compares to your internal SATA drive, well, there is still room for improvement. Here is an HD Tach screenshot for a pretty standard 250GB 7200 RPM internal SATA drive.

As you can see, USB 3.0 is not out to replace your internal hard drive but it offers a pretty decent throughput for external hard drives moving forward. I would be particularly interested in testing Solid State and Flash drives when they come our as there is a good possibility of them saturating the USB 3.0 bus.

But if you’re looking for the best bang for your buck, the traditional mechanical hard drives will continue to lead that segment. The Buffalo MiniStation Lite USB 3.0 drive will cost you around US$160 (AED 590) for the 500GB version and $199 (AED 730) for the 640GB version.

As labeled on the box, the drive works with Windows 7 and comes with a 60 day downloadable version of Norton Internet Security. Having said that, I had no issues connecting this drive to a Mac. It will work equally well with Windows XP or Vista as well . Also impressive, is the three year warranty that A-DATA provides with this drive which is about two years more than many other USB drives.

Looks wise, the SH93 is quite different than your average portable hard drive. The yellow and black rubber-plastic finish looks like its cut out from a tyre of a car. Its available in red as well in case yellow is not your colour. The selling point for the SH93 is that its the first shock proof and waterproof portable USB HDD.

I tested this by dropping the SH93 from a 1 meter table while it was plugged in and then submerged it in a bowl of water that is normally reserved for my wife’s culinary adventures. I’m delighted to say that the drive continued working without any issues after the bump or the drowning.

The following are benchmarks posted by the SH93. First up is the HDTach screenshot.

Next, we compares the scores to some of the external drives we’ve tested such as the Seagate Free Agent Go, A-DATA’s NH92 and Western Digital’s Firewire based Studio II.

Obviously, the firewire with its higher throughput provers to be the fastest, but coming to USB drives, the SH93 lies pretty much in between the Seagate and the other A-DATA drive meaning its performance is average.

So what you have with the SH93 is an average performing USB drive with a not-so-average design and feature set. If you’re the kind that likes to explore the outdoors and want to carry storage with you for off-loading your camera or carrying your extensive music library, then I would certainly suggest the SH93. And it wont break your bank either at roughly AED 300 for the 320GB version.