Western Digital Adds E-Labels and Docks to Its HDDs My Book Elite and Studio Come with a Screen; My Passport Elite Portable Drive Gets Handy Dock

Western Digital has decided to teach its external hard drives some new
tricks. The new My Book Elite and Studio will both get a digital label
while the My Passport Elite portable drive gets a dock. The question is,
do we really need new accessories for our external hard drives?

The next My Book Elite hard drive will offer you only USB 2.0
connectivity and it will be available in four different versions from
640GB all the way up to 2TB. The 2TB model will cost you $279.99 which
is not a bad price at all.

The next My Book Studio comes with FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 connectivity
and it will be available in two versions, 1TB and 2TB. The 2TB version
costs $299.99 which, again, is not a bad price at all.

The next My Passport Elite is a storage solution made for laptop owners
and it s going to be available in five versions, from 250GB to 640GB.
The 640GB version will cost you $170 but that s the price to pay for an
ultraportable 2.5-inch hard drive!

Now that I ve shown you what these portable drives can do, let me tell
you a little something about those extra features, the labels and the
dock. The two My Book drives come both with an e-label on the side which
will tell you stuff like available storage space left on the drive and
their names (you can go wild and name each My Book as long as you keep
it under 12-characters.) How is that useful? Sure the e-label is going
to be available even when the HDD doesn t have any power but do we
really need to know at all times how much available space we have on our
Elite or Studio desktop hard drives? I don t know about you but I can go
on for days without knowing how much actual free space my portable drive
has.

The dock is bundled with the My Passport Elite line. How is that useful?
Well you ll use the dock every time your Passport Elite comes to say
hello to your desktop. Unless you own a Mac mini-like or all-in-one
desktop, connecting the Elite to your regular tower PC could be awfully
inconvenient and exhausting.

So, the bottom line folks, the dock we can definitely use while the
E-Ink labels are not a must have feature for a hard drive. Wouldn t you
agree?