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]

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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?