Western Digital has added a pair of new external storage drives to its Mac product line. The company now offers 750GB and 1TB iterations of the My Passport SE. Aimed specifically at Apple computer users, the drive comes formatted for Mac systems, and Western Digital says it's compatible with Apple Time Machine software.

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hey good to see that! btw western digital is the best!
their devices are pretty good and their pricing is also justified!
great work!

Any drive formatted in HFS can be used for Time Machine, it's not there's a special requirement for it. & pre-formatting the drive in HFS shouldn't account for a price increase. If at least it had Firewire as well as USB2, I wouldn't mind so much.

Yes a lack of firewire is disappointing.

Actually I looked at their website, and it looks like the 'Mac Ready' drives and the Windows formatted drives are both about the same price. Also saw an Firewire edition offered on there.

humm...

quite interesting, will check it out, still my preference goes to SSD, yet bigger ones aren't as big as mechanical drive & cost is a big factor.

cheers!

mac is always different shameful

Wow twice the price of a regular drive of the same size?
Well the pricing is no different if a Mac user is buying it...
And not to mention only USB 2.

I'm a bit confused about compatibility, I thought WD drives already worked on both platforms. I would much rather prefer to have a drive that can be used in both my windows and mac osx environments. For backup I think that is what the mac oriented drives are for?

Does it have any other purpose than just external drive? I just thought because why would other use this if there are flash disks that can store files too... If it is an alternative to hard drives for pc on the other hand, it shall not be removed from computer therefore!...

Password protection is a good feature..................

Who cares. I just need it to work on my windows machine.

Always thought these pre-made external HDD's were too pricey. Just get yourself a 1TB from Newegg for ~$90, pick yourself up a docking bay or enclosure depending what you want (~$25), then just get open-source software that you need like TrueCrypt for HDD password protection. Pretty easy to do for anyone imo. I personally use a docking bay for my external HDD's and have them encrypted with TrueCrypt :) . Works great and its cheaper!

Did it really fit on that small case? I mean my last external HDD(120GB) is roughly the same size. Technology moves really fast.

They can, normal external drives work on Macs just as well as "Mac" externals.

The only real difference is that the Mac ones probably come with WD's backup software for Macs on the drive. That is about the only thing I can think of that would make them different. As Didou points out the regular WD externals can be formatted as HFS and used just fine on a Mac (and of course they can, drives don't care what file system they use - and also by extension Time Machine doesn't care either).

So if there is a price difference between the Mac drives and the normal ones then that is unfortunate. But like I said, it may be because of Mac specific backup software included with the drive. I could understand a price difference if it came with FW400 or FW800.

it is and the most important in my opinion. Not to mention but its probably ruining (AES) Advanced Encryption Standard no doubt. Great prices though, even though I'm not quite interested in anything Mac at the moment, but its Western Digital and I love they're hardware. Going a bit off topic but, I haven't really been seeing any of much Apple news or Mac hardware/software lately... would be nice if they're where some more.

Now they just need those magnetic cables so it doesn't fall and waste all your dough.