This leads me to make it clear to all that didn\'t know that contrary to all the buzz names and marketing terms, there are in fact only two types of hard drives out there. Hard drives that have failed and hard drives that will fail. The point being that hard drives are not a storage device that will last forever and if your digital information is important to you then its imperative to have a strategy in play that will minimise risk.

In the world of Apple we have been fortunate enough to have an automated and seamless application at our disposal called Time Machine which Apple has included in Mac OS X since \'Tiger\' that maintains regular hourly backups on a separate hard drive that has given us peace of mind and added security. Having said this, some people may be curious to understand why Western Digital (WD) produce a Mac specific external drive called My Passport Studio. The simple reason why such a device is practical is actually quite obvious. It doesn\'t matter if you use Time Machine to do regular backups, the risk is should something go wrong at the location - think fire and theft then you could lose everything which could be a lot more painful than the financial cost of losing the hardware.

So what makes the WD My Passport Studio special given you could buy a WD drive and put into an external enclosure to do essentially the same thing? Well the WD My Passport Studio simply does not do the same thing because it\'s simply just not an external hard drive although the packaging is somewhat understated and may lead you to that conclusion.

Firstly the WD My Passport Studio has some bundled software on the hard drive called WD Smartware which is required to be installed on your Mac. Once installed the software scans your computer and classifies all your files into pictures, music, movies, documents, system files etc. It then allows you to select the file groups of interest using a user friendly visual interface and then create a backup regime to copy onto your external drive. This is a great plus for those who aren\'t computer savvy as it takes away the thinking and does the analysis, collation/grouping and then the copying for you. Of course you can select just pictures or movies or a combination of different file types to be backed up.

One of the nice yet dangerous features the WD Smartware software provides is the ability to secure your external drive with a password but of course if you forget your password you will lose access to your drive but that is a fair price to pay for security. This means the WD My Passport Studio can be stored in a safe location without the concern that the drive can be accessed by anyone else without the password.

One of the neat things the WD My Passport Studio has is a LCD panel on the enclosure which they refer to as an E-label where you can label the drive for instant recognition. For example you could label it Videos if you have multiple WD My Passport Studio drives and the particular drive in use is for backing videos. Of course you can name it whatever makes sense to you. The only thing I didn\'t like here was that you could only use uppercase which I thought was an unusual limitation. The LCD panel also has the option to display a meter bar to indicate how much of the drive has been used. It also displays the capacity of the drive adjacent to this bar. Overall the E-label nice feature and comes in quite handy.

The WD My Passport Studio for Mac is of course pre-formatted in the appropriate format that Apple use in OS X. The interface is either Firewire 800 or its poor cousin USB 2.0. I am not sure why they bothered with USB because it is known to be inferior to Firewire and most Mac users would be well advised to avoid it where possible. The box includes a Firewire 800 to Firewire 400 adaptor for those with the older Macs that don\'t have Firewire 800. Of course Firewire 400 is still superior to USB 2.0 so again don\'t bother with the later if you can avoid it.

Overall the WD My Passport Studio is a very handy package for those looking for extra peace of mind and the comfort that are using a quality product made one of the leading if not the leading hard drive manufacturer in the world today. The interface to manage the backup process is automated and user friendly and designed with the novice in mind. The added security features is a nice touch and makes the WD My Passport Studio a great all round product. The packaging could do with a revamp because they really do understate the great features of this product.