WD joins fashion drive parade

Let's face it. External hard drives aren't much to look at. Nevertheless, that hasn't discouraged drive makers from trying to add some sizzle to their storage boxes. Fabrik led the charge in this market with its Signature Mini drives designed by Italian styleshop Pininfarina. Now that grand old house of storage Western Digital is getting in on the fashion act by announcing today a new line of My Passport Elite USB portable drives.

The lightweight WD drives weigh in at under five ounces and come in four colors--bronze, titanium, westminster blue and cherry red. (When simple colors like red and blue have adjectives, you know a company is trying to to do more than appeal to a consumer's hidden geek.)

The units have a "soft-touch" finish that makes them easy to hold and gives them tactile appeal.

Two capacities are being offered: 250GB ($189.99) and 320GB ($219.99). WD estimates that the 250GB drive can hold 71,400 digital photos and the 320GB drive, 91,400 images.

The devices are powered through their USB cables. I've found that that arrangement usually works better with desktops than laptops. To address that problem, makers of these drives include a double-headed USB cable with their units so they can draw sufficient power from two ports simultaneously. The drawback with that is you lose two USB ports to the drive, not just one, which can be vexing given the limited number of USB ports on some notebook computers.

A capacity gauge is incorporated into the drives to quickly assess disk usage and the drives have plug-and-play capability for gaming consoles. Software packaged with the devices facilitate automatic backup and synchronization of data. The units also carry a five-year limited warranty.