Western Digital has announced several new additions to its families of external and portable hard drives today. There are a couple of new and interesting features to make the drives more appealing to consumers. For instance, both the My Book Elite and My Book Studio now sport an e-paper display that shows the exact amount of storage capacity remaining and a customizable label even when the disk isn't plugged in.


As always, the Studio Edition comes pre-formatted in HFS+ for OS X systems and offers a FireWire 800 interface in addition to a USB port. This Mac-oriented drive is available in capacities ranging between 500GB and 2TB, priced between $150 and $300, whereas the My Book Elite models have capacities between 1TB and 2TB and cost between $170 and $280.

The company also updated its My Passport Elite line by adding a dock and upping its storage capacity to 640GB for $170. The revamped portable hard drive is slimmer and more rounded at the edges than previous models and has a LED indicator that shows how much data is on the drive. All of the hard drives come with the option of 256-bit hardware encryption and Time Machine-like continuous backup software.