In fact, let’s be honest – most people just use them for storage and that’s basically the end of it. So hard drive manufacturers have to come up with creative ways to market its external drives, usually by working on the looks or by including funky software with the drive. Western Digital has done both of these with its My Passport Elite range of 2.5-inch external hard drives.

The My Passport Elite is encased in a sleek gunmetal grey casing with shiny black trim along three of the four sides. It’s coated in a slightly velvety finish which Western Digital calls ‘soft-touch” and makes holding the drive easier and more comfortable in your hands (and also sounds as if it’s something that you should take to bed with you).

Instead of a single boring activity LED which most of external hard drives have, Western Digital has snazzied things up and installed four white status LED’s that light up from left to right whenever you’re transferring files onto the drive. The status LEDs also act as a rough capacity indicator for the hard drive. In a nice little touch, the USB port can also be covered by sliding across the plastic LED window when not in use.

The 320GB My Passport Elite uses Western Digital’s 160GB platter technology and is powered via a USB port. Included in the box along with the drive is a standard 5-pin mini USB cable, just in case you don’t have one – or twenty – at hand already. However the bundled cable may be too short if you have to reach around the back of your case to access a port .

Once hooked up to a Windows PC, the drive is automatically detected and a WD icon appears on your system tray which lists the drive name, volumes, percentage used and the temperature status of the drive, all in a pop-up bubble.

Included on the drive itself is Mionet, which provides you with free remote access to data on your drive and is unfortunately only for Windows users. Also included is the ever present backup and sync software to make sure you backup your data in the event of any unforseen circumstances that may arise.

In synthetic testing the My Passport Elite had an average read of 33.8MB/s in HD Tach 3.0.4.0 and performed similarly in HD Tune 2.55 with an average read of 31.8MB/s. In real world testing, 2.2GB of files were transferred onto the Elite in 1 minute 49 seconds, resulting in a transfer rate of 20.18MB/s. Transferring the same files from the Elite back to the system’s hard drive took 1 minute 26 seconds which is a transfer rate of 25.58MB/s.

The external hard drive market has always swung between staid styling with futuristic touches and flashy over-exuberant designs, so it’s refreshing to see that Western Digital has found a happy medium with its approach to the My Passport Elite. Along with respectable performance and good bundled software, the My Passport Elite is an external hard drive to look out for.