My Passport Elite Drives Shoot for Style

“A luxurious soft touch” may not be a selling point for most hard drives out there, but Western Digital is mixing up expectations with the launch of its My Passport Elite line of portable hard drives. The company’s latest lightweight drives are designed as much to be fashion symbols as vaults for data.

If it weren’t for an array of LEDs and a mini-USB jack on the bottom half of the My Passport Elite, it might easily be mixed up for a book or day planner thanks to a rounded edge that looks like a spine, and two other book-like tapered corners. It also comes finished in bronze, titanium, Westminster blue or cherry red, with a soft-touch finish that WD promises makes the drive “easy to grip, comfortable to hold, and fashionable to carry.”

From a technical standpoint, the drives have a number of other features in their favor, including an at-a-glance capacity gauge (once plugged in), WD’s own automatic backup software, plug-and-play capability, and MioNet software for sharing the drives’ contents over the Internet. They also weigh just 5 ounces.

The 250GB and 320GB versions of the drive are available immediately from WD for $169.99 and $199.99, respectively.