MY PASSPORT ELITE FROM WESTERN Digital's stable has melt some of the features down found on larger drives into the portable pocket-size form factor. The Passport Elite's strengths are its capacity (it comes in 320GB and 250GB versions), speed, compactness, USB port protection, and a decent software package (well this works with Windows only).

The Elite has a titanium-colored body with a soft-touch finishing. The drive is available in a multi-color casing of bronze, blue, or red. The Elite's mini-USB port is protected behind a sliding cover, an improvement over drives that lack port shielding. The utility software comes tip as an auto-install. The software is Windows only, but the drive works perfectly on Mac system as well, since it is FAT32-formatted.

You can load WD Sync, a software package that lets you sync your PC's Documents folder and Out look files with those on another Pc. WD Sync has 128-bit encryption for security. But to use the Sync software you will require registering the drive that you have with the website. The Elite also comes with a subscription to MioN et, an online remote access package that lets you get to your files on your home PC's drive, as long as you install the MioNet utility to your "home base" Pc.

Name: Western Digital My Passport Elite (320 GB) Hard Drive.jpg Views: 2248 Size: 11.0 KB

The subscription is free for the life of the drive. All in all, it's a good set of utilities, provided you're using a Windows Pc. The Elite's five-year warranty is a huge plus.
As far as the drive speed is concern, we did a real time test by transferring a soup of 700MB and 4.7GB of data(the soup of data includes .exe, .vob. doc etc). The drive is speedy but WD's My Book Home Edition still beat the Elite in speed. To read a 700Mb of data the Elite took 24 sec and it took 24 sec to write.

For a higher data transfer rate we test the read and write speed with 4.7 GB of data. The Elite took 2min 35sec to read and 2min 50sec to write. As we see, WD My Book performs slightly better than the Elite, but the contributing factor for the My Book's victory is the higher RPM which is nOOrpm compare to Elites 5400rpm. Overall this is a speedy drive and definitely a travel delight as it doesn't need any extra power.