Western Digital My Passport Edge 500GB

Has Western Digital found an edge with its slimmest My Passport yet?

Western Digital My Passport Edge 500GB

Each year, hardware makers pick a theme, and this year's theme is 'sleek'. I know this because every product launch uses the word, and the one promoting the new Western Digital My Passport Edge is no exception.

We're meant to accept that this drive is better than the previous My Passport design because it's thinner, even if I didn't notice that model had been eating all the pies. This one is 12.8mm deep, and the old 'Essentials' design was a portly 1 5mm - a whole 2.2mm thicker. However, this device is about more than being supermodel-slim, thankfully.

Testing the drive on a USB 3.0 port, the Edge is very snappy indeed. File transfers will hurtle along according to my benchmarks, which recorded read performance of 116,616KB/s and writing at 105,447KB/s. That's quicker than many older internal drives and perfect for a business person wanting to make that train with all his files fully synchronized.

To that end, Western Digital has also preloaded the Edge with some rather slick software that can automate the live duplication of folders to the drive. It's not the only software perk it offers; it also has a straightforward tool that secures the drive with a password. Western Digital claims it has hardware encryption, but I'm not sure if it really means it encrypts the whole drive. Whatever it does, it should stop most people accessing the contents should the Edge be stolen.

I like Western Digital's thinking in this respect, because you can buy cheap external drives that work perfectly well, but without these utilities they often won't have the files you want on them when it's critical.

However, I also recall the previous version of WD Smartware was not easily removable once installed, though this one seemed amenable to that option. What it won't do is work with external drives that aren't by Western Digital, annoyingly

I have two bigger problems with the new Edge, and the first is the price, which is nearly double what you can get the old My Passport Essential 500GB for. That's on the high side, even when you factor in some of the nice new software features. Perhaps we shouldn't complain too loudly, though, because the Mac-specific version of this unit is another $13 for no good reason other than it's preformatted for that OS and has been styled to look like an iPhone.

The other point is that at 500GB, this is hardly the largest capacity of portable storage available, and there are bigger drives even in the My Passport range.

The new My Passport Edge is a well-constructed and decidedly clean design that offers performance and elegance in a single package. However, it's also at least $16 more than it should be, even with some genuinely useful software included. It does come with a three-year warranty, which might come in useful if you're inherently unlucky with storage.