Essential.Need to format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows. Currently, there are six series, which include. My Passport is a sequence of portable external hard drives by Western Digital. In our time trials, we found the Turbo drivers did boost the speed of the connection a bit, but we found that even with the boost the My Passport Studio is only an average performer.So, lets start. On top of it all, the My Passport Studio features what the company calls “Turbo” capabilities that is supposed to boost data transfer speeds.Like many portable drives, the My Passport Studio doesn’t offer eSATA. Already formatted for the Mac, the My Passport Studio can be easily attached into a computer with your connection of choice—FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0. So, if you want to use an external hard drive on both Windows and Mac, you need to format it to a filesystem that is compatible with Windows PC and Mac.The external shell is simple, but what the drive lacks in stylistic verve it makes up for in ease of use. They are incompatible with each other. Windows uses NTFS and Mac uses HFS.This is the first drive we’ve reviewed that offers FireWire 800 and 400 Turbo as well. Now, many external drives offer USB Turbo technology for the PC it’s not always available on the Mac. If your computer doesnt have a USB Type-C port, an included USB Type-C to Type-A adapter helps ensure compatibility with older systems.Western Digital’s My Passport Studio 500GBBack in 2007, Buffalo introduced USB Turbo technology that supposedly increased USB data transfer rates by up to 60 percent.
Western My Passport Format And Pc Drivers Did BoostIt took 52 seconds to copy a 1GB file while using the USB 2.0 Turbo connection. The results with the FireWire 400 and 800 connections were even less impressive on average, the connection speed only improved 2 to 3 seconds compared to the test results without the Turbo drivers installed.The results could have used a more significant boost with the turbo capabilities, because the drive’s scores were disappointing in our time trials. The drivers are available on the drive itself (so don’t format the drive without looking first), or you can download the drivers from WD’s Web site.On average, the USB connection was improved by only six percent with the Turbo drivers. Working ps2 emulator macIt’s still plenty of space to fit music, photos, and other media but can’t compete with the one or two terabyte capacities of high-end drives. Unfortunately, while the scores are satisfactory, the added Turbo capabilities were disappointing.The 500GB capacity of the My Passport Studio is fairly large for a portable drive, but can’t compete with the higher capacities of non-portable desktop drives. Interestingly, the FireWire 400 Turbo and USB 2.0 Turbo connections produced very similar scores that were within the margin of error both finished the duplication test around 1 minute, 15 seconds and took 1 minute, 37 seconds to complete the Photoshop test. The 1GB Duplication Test and Low-Memory Photoshop Test were all generally a few seconds off the best times posted by other external drives. While using the FireWire 800 connection, OWC’s Mercury On-The-Go FireWire 800/400 + USB 2.0 ( ) beat the My Passport Studio by a full 6 seconds, or 15 percent. We copied a folder containing 1GB of data from our Mac’s hard drive to the external hard drive to test the drive’s write speed. We tested the drive with each available port—FireWire 800, USB 2, and FireWire 400 to 800 adapter. We ran all tests with drives connected to a Mac Pro Quad 2.66GHz Xeon with Mac OS X 10.5 installed and 1GB of RAM. This later price is even more impressive than the Toshiba USB 2.0, which has a price per gigabyte of 45 cents, and lacks the My Passport Studio’s FireWire 400 and 800 connections.How we tested. Western Digital currently is offering a promotional discount that brings the price of the drive down to $200 and the price per gigabyte down to 40 cents. We also used the drive as a scratch disk when running our low-memory Adobe Photoshop CS3 Suite test.
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