January 6 - 11:25am EST   Western Digital has launched two new external hard drives, oriented specifically at Mac users: the My Passport for Mac and My Book Mac Edition. Though only supporting USB 2.0 and not FireWire, the drives are pre-formatted for Macs and advertised as supporting Time Machine as well as other Mac backup software. The My Passport is a general-purpose portable drive, set inside a shock-resistant enclosure; 320 and 500GB versions are available. [full story]

April 9 - 4:10pm EDT   WD's compact Passport Essential portable drives are now available in 11 colors, the company announced on Wednesday. Each color is available with a choice of 120GB, 160GB, 250GB or 320GB internal 2.5-inch HDDs. The Passport Essential drives are cleanly styled and simple to use, featuring just one USB connection for power and file transfer, and are compatible with both PCs and Macs. Windows users have the benefit of 128-bit data encryption. [full story]

April 2 - 2:25pm EDT   Western Digital on Wednesday introduced its My Book Studio Edition II external dual-drive storage systems. Available with capacities of either 1TB or 2TB, the drives are formatted for Mac computers, but also come with software to make them Windows compatible. Both drives share four interface options, ranging from eSATA and FireWire 800 to FireWire 400 and USB 2.0. Each drive is meant for speed-intensive activities such as video editing, and as such default to a striped RAID 0 configuration; either model can however be configured for a RAID 1 mirrored setup, as necessary. [full story]