Western Digital’s My Book range is excellent - and in fact is eponymous, as if you put it on a bookshelf you’ll find that it blends right in.  Well, Western Digital has gone one further.  The new release in their external hard drive family is the My Passport Essential.

This incredibly small, sexy drive is less than five ounces in weight and has tiny dimensions to match.  You can purchase it in either 160, 250 or 320GB sizes, which is a lot of data storage whatever you do - not least due to the physical size of the drive.

As usual with the Western Digital products, you don’t tend to get much colour choice here - I’m afraid it’s a glossy black finish (shown) or nothing.  One thing I will say though is that on the flipside it doesn’t attract too much dust and I can’t emphasize enough how much it suits the dinky proportions.

The whole thing is powered by USB alone which is pretty nice.  There’s nothing worse than to have to drag along a bulky power supply.  It comes with WD Sync for easy data management/backup and 128 bit encryption.  Speed is up to 480 mbits/sec and of course features 1.1 or 2.0 USB functionality.  I’d certainly recommend it.  Prices are around $199.