The latest bus-powered compact drives are available in capacities up to 2TB.  If there's one thing that photo and video shooters can't get enough of, it's storage space for the growing file sizes we're dealing with.

The new Western Digital My Passport Studio drives for Mac users sleek and compact (particularly when you consider we're getting 2TB of storage).  WD recently sent me a pair of the new drives to try out.  The drive's external shell is mix of silver and black aluminum, which goes along nicely with the current MacBook motif.

As with with recent iterations of Western Digital's FireWire 800 drives, the new My Passport Studio drives sport dual FW800 ports, allowing you to daisy chain multiple devices and only use a single port on your computer.

The dual port feature is an important one considering that the current MacBook Pros only offer a single FireWire 800 port.  As a result, daisy-chaining is the only option.  I've had up to 5 individual bus-powered drives daisy-chained at a single time.  Fortunately though, the increased capacity of smaller drives like the new My Passport Studio means that I can pack around a pair of 2TB drives and get a whole lot more mileage out of a smaller footprint in my bag and on my desk.

WD gets a lot of speed out of the 5400rpm drives inside this tiny chassis and gives the FireWire connection a pretty good push.  When I first plugged in the WD 2TB FireWire 800 drives, I was a little disappointed at what I saw with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.

I was seeing a respectable 64MB/s write speed, but only a rather meager 35MB/s read speed. However, WD includes something called +TURBO drivers in…