Western Digital My Passport Essential Gets Redesign

The redesign is to make it look more like the WD My Book drives, which is an attractive look. Alongside the appearance upgrade, there was a capacity bump with the drive topping out at 320GB now.

I am a big fan of bus-powered external hard drives, mainly because every external drive I've ever had has had a large power brick that was required. That creates two nuisances, first of all it greatly decreased the portability of the drive, mainly because I never wanted to mess with unplugging it or having to plug it back in, the second being that I always had to find an outlet, I couldn't just plug it into my computer.

They'll still be selling the 160 and 250 gigabyte models as well. The 320GB model will cost you a very fair $200, that's a very fair price due to the fact that a 2.5" WD drive with 320GB of space is selling for $200 on NewEgg right now, without the bus-powered enclosure.

[via Electronista]