Review We approve of the ongoing miniaturisation of external hard drives, but the process has its limits. Western Digital’s latest My Passport Essential is among the smallest drives of its class, but WD’s choice of a tiny connector could be the product’s downfall.
WD’s My Passport Essential: quirky, asymmetrical notebook design
Available in capacities ranging from 250GB to 640GB – we tested the 500GB model – the new MPE is comes in a glossy 110 x 83 x 15mm casing offered in five different colours. It’s just smaller than Samsung’s wee S2 Portable and similarly bus powered.
The casing is curiously asymmetric, WD having applied the broad characteristics of its Desktop My Book drive range to the smaller, portable offering. Three edges are flat, the fourth convex, giving it the look of a Moleskine notebook, though the WD is smaller. You can seen people carrying it cupped between fingers and palm.
The activity LED is located on the spine of the ‘book’. But this volume isn’t designed to be kept upright. The flat edges aren’t sufficiently level to allow the MPE to stand on its end. Knowing this, WD has equipped the drive’s base with four tiny rubber feet. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Last year, getting 500GB out of a big Desktop external hard drive was impressive. Now, you have have half-a-terabyte of storage in the palm of your hand. Literally, if you happen to have LG’s new XD2 about your person.
LG’s XD2: certainly not a PDA
Taking design cues from Samsung, its South Koran rival, LG has fashioned the XD2 in a black shell that’s flat on the matte top and gloss bottom until it angles gently to edge about a centimetre in from the rim. The sides, broken only by the join where the two halves of the casing come together, are very gently convex. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Samsung has been making hard drives for years, but it’s taken a wee bit longer for it to decide that if Western Digital, Seagate and co. can extend their drive production efforts to nice, shiny external storage units for consumers, it can too.
Samsung’s Story: strong and (almost) silent
What Samsung has lacked thus far is the design nous to take what essentially a generic product – the hard drive – marry it with some off-the-shelf electronics and then – here’s the crucial bit – stick it all in an attractive enclosure. The innards are largely the same, so these days you differentiate one external drive from another almost entirely on looks.
And the new Story Station is cute, in a solid, muted Terminator kind of way. There’s no bright chrome, no piano black glossiness, just a brushed gunmetal upper surface, and a matte black front, back and bottom. Read the rest of this entry »
