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Western Digital My Passport Essential  (Source: Western Digital)

Western Digital My Passport Essential in Pocket  (Source: Western Digital)
320GB My Passport Essential gets all its juice from the USB port

With notebook sales quickly outpacing sales of desktop systems, many computer users are leaving larger desktop computers behind. One of the biggest drawbacks to notebook computers is that they typically lack the storage space you find on desktop systems.

Western Digital announced a new My Passport Essential portable hard drive today. The Essential has 320GB of storage capacity in a small package that is completely powered by the USB bus of a notebook or desktop computer. This means that the drive requires no AC adapter making it much more portable.

Users who don’t need 320GB of storage can opt for 250GB or 160GB versions as well. The My Passport Essential uses USB 2.0 to reach a maximum transfer rate of 480 Mbits/s. The drive is small measuring in at 0.590-inches high x 4.967-inches long x 3.130-inches wide and weighs only 0.231 pounds for the 320GB version.

Western Digital includes WD Sync software that allows users to sync data between their computer and the drive easily. The software synchronizes files from Outlook automatically and encrypts data with 128-bit protection. Google software is pre-installed on the drive as well including Desktop Search and Picasa as well as the Google toolbar. The 320GB My Passport Essential retails for $199.99.

Users of small ultra-portable notebooks like the ASUS Eee PC may find that the added storage capacity of the drive makes using a very small notebook more practical.

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Why no love for Firewire?
By thornburg on 1/30/2008 3:47:27 PM , Rating: 2
Is this news? I mean, there are already 2.5" 320GB drives, right? So what's special about this one? (Or am I missing something and it's actually a 1.8" drive?)

I mean, Newegg already has an acomdata and a simpletech for similar price and similar features. Why does this warrant an article unto itself?




RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By mmntech on 1/30/2008 4:16:26 PM , Rating: 3
The big attraction seems to be full USB power without an adapter. That's why Firewire is great for drives because the bus provides more power. Unfortunately, most consumer desktop and laptop PCs don't have a Firewire port so making it USB only makes sense.


RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By Mclendo06 on 1/30/2008 4:59:14 PM , Rating: 2
I always thought most laptops did have a FireWire/1394a port (Dell's cheapest Inspiron model has one, I figure this makes it at least pretty standard). The problem is that laptop FireWire ports are typically of the miniature 4 pin variety (thanks to Sony's i.Link), meaning they lack the power transmission capabilities of the standard 6 pin interface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireWire


RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By ajfink on 1/30/2008 5:12:09 PM , Rating: 2
I've been under that impression as well, that most consumer notebooks DO include Firewire ports. Mine (dv5000t) does.


RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By gramboh on 1/30/2008 5:23:21 PM , Rating: 2
Consumer ones do, but business models don't seem to. My Dell Lattitude D620 only has USB.


RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By Lonyo on 1/30/2008 6:36:42 PM , Rating: 2
I thought most laptop Firewire ports were unpowered?


RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By abhaxus on 1/30/2008 9:28:02 PM , Rating: 2
Yes, most laptop ports are 4 pin unpowered firewire ports... hence why all of these portable hard drives are USB :(

Having a problem with my girlfriend's professor at school, who says that she must have a firewire hard drive to work with final cut pro and refuses to believe that a usb 2.0 drive will work just fine. A high quality USB drive with plenty of storage can be had super cheap, while the firewire port tacks about 30 bucks to the cost for a good quality drive.


RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By kelmon on 1/31/2008 3:54:12 AM , Rating: 2
True, a USB hard drive will work fine BUT if you have a FireWire port (and, aside from the Air, I believe all Macs have at least a powered FireWire 400 port) then you'd be nuts to go with USB option, particularly if you are planning to work with video. I mean, what's $30 these days? It'll work but it's not the best option. Personally, I'm still annoyed at Apple for dropping FireWire from the iPod since that's an ideal place for FireWire support.

FireWire kinda feels like Betamax. It's the better product but since USB is more common it gets all the love. I just hope that it doesn't die out completely as that would be such a shame.


RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By afkrotch on 1/31/2008 9:23:50 AM , Rating: 2
Umm...why exactly is Firewire the better solution? It's 400 mbps, while USB is 480 mbps. Firewire 2 is 800 mbps, but doesn't look like you're talking about that.


RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By Mclendo06 on 1/31/2008 11:37:45 AM , Rating: 2
FireWire supports 400 Mbps sustained throughput. USB 2.0 is capable 480 Mbps burst rates, but for a variety of reasons more typically transfers data at half that rate. Take a look at the FireWire Wiki that I linked to a few posts up, also the USB Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus

Both of these articles have good comparison sections with a number of references.

One place I know that FireWire has a significant leg up is in audio interfaces. Since USB devices have to be polled by the host (computer) before transferring data, the latencies of such devices often make them unacceptable for multi-channel audio recording (high latency prevents what you are recording from being in sync with the other existing tracks). Firewire devices, on the other hand, have latencies which are small enough to be completely imperceptible to the human ear and can stream at least 16 48kHz audio channels to your computer simultaneously.


RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By SandmanWN on 1/31/2008 11:54:38 AM , Rating: 2
As the poster above is pointing out USB has a higher overhead, so that 480 vs 400 advantage is squandered.

Firewire also has a neat feature such as isochronous transfer mode. When connected to a device it can request dedicated bandwidth for a steady data stream. This is one of the major reason why Firewire is at home in digital video. A steady stream is absolutely key in real time video streaming without compression which gives you better picture clarity.

Another is USB's need for a host based connection. It requires a host to function properly, like your PC. Firewire is a peer-to-peer connection. It can talk directly to any other firewire device without a device between it.

Another would be the daisy chain network topology. Firewire is used in multi cd/dvd burner systems frequently to daisy chain all the drives together off of one firewire connector. You can also daisy chain multiple hard drives, etc, etc.

There are many more reasons as well but I think you will see the point now.

The main reason why Firewire has never taken a large portion of the market is price. It has never been able to get as cheap as USB so of course manufacturers go with the cheapest method available to them.


RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By TomZ on 1/31/2008 1:37:02 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Firewire also has a neat feature such as isochronous transfer mode.

USB also has always supported isochronous transfers, so I don't see that as any kind of comparative advantage for Firewire.

And you're right about the reason for success of USB over Firewire - it is about the cost. Intel early on decided to integrate USB support directly into its chipsets, so adding USB ports to a system costs very little, compared to firewire which usually requires a separate controller which adds a few dollars of cost.

In my mind, there is no question that Firewire is a technically superior standard compared to USB, but at the end of the day, business forces dominate these types of decisions and determine their outcomes.


RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By neothe0ne on 1/30/2008 7:31:49 PM , Rating: 2
Say hello to my overpriced, bloated but still-suck HP Pavilion laptop with its AMD Turion X2, GeForce 6150 Go graphics, some kind of "High Definition" audio/speakers. No firewire.


RE: Why no love for Firewire?
By Tamale on 1/30/2008 4:37:02 PM , Rating: 2
what i'm more confused by is the fact that i was looking at purchasing a 2.5" 320gb external, usb-powered hard drive from western digital called the 'passport' over a month ago... ??


Speed
By Screwballl on 1/30/2008 4:57:25 PM , Rating: 2
I would rather pay a few extra dollars for an eSATA version of these type of portable drives. Not only will the speed increase be noticeable, it would be a very welcome port addition to laptops. The only downside to that would be the power requirements (having to plug in a brick) since eSATA does not handle the power itself over the bus, only data to powered devices. How hard would it be to have a USB port for power only and still use the eSATA???
All the same, I would rather have the extra power cord (should be easy to make it retractable) or USB power connection and have the amazing speed boost, especially when dealing with larger files..

1.5 to 3 Gb/s versus 480Mb/s... amazing speed difference here.




RE: Speed
By dcalfine on 1/30/2008 5:12:12 PM , Rating: 2
the 5400RPM drive really isn't saturating the channel
and not too many mobile products support eSATA


RE: Speed
By slashbinslashbash on 1/30/2008 10:01:59 PM , Rating: 2
The big difference is that (e)SATA is a native hard drive protocol on both ends. USB has tons of overhead and is prone to unreasonable latencies at odd times. Latency is the problem with most hard drive accesses, not bandwidth; the extra latency of USB adds to the inherent latency problems in the HDD itself. SATA is a much more streamlined protocol, because it is basically single-purpose. (To bring up a point in another thread, FireWire is also much more free of overhead when compared to USB 2.0; the "480mbps" of USB2 ends up being slower than the 400mbps of FireWire in many ordinary scenarios.)


RE: Speed
By TomZ on 1/30/2008 5:13:20 PM , Rating: 2
Practically no laptops have eSATA, and laptop users are clearly the target market for this type of device. There are already lots of external HDDs with eSATA for users where size and need for an AC adapter is not a big concern.


RE: Speed
By Screwballl on 1/30/2008 11:02:12 PM , Rating: 2
right... but a good majority of them are 3.5" drives, not 2.5" or 1.8" drives... it would just be nice to see a smaller drive of this type have eSATA as an option rather than be forced to use the slow as molasses USB...


RE: Speed
By kelmon on 1/31/2008 3:57:01 AM , Rating: 2
The lack of a bus-powered option is a deal-breaker for a mobile user but any l