When one thinks of a hard drive, style doesn’t usually come to mind. That’s because most people don’t care about that sort of thing. However when the style is actually functional, that’s a different story and is desirable.

Enter the My Passport portable hard drive from Western Digital. This is a 500GB portable drive that connects via USB 2.0. It also comes in 400, 320 and 250GB sizes as well. And it comes in 9 different colors – but you don’t care about that.

What you do care about is what it looks like and what makes it truly portable.

Here’s a few images of it:

This is certainly better than a larger USB hard drive caddy especially considering it does the same job and is self-powered via the USB. No external power supply needed. That’s a huge plus.

For those using Windows you also get 128-bit encryption.

The price? It’s $149 thru Western Digital or if you shop around you can get one for as low as $109. When I checked the price I honestly thought it was going to cost a whole lot more, but thankfully it stays well within a reasonable price range.

The biggest drawback is that USB 2.0 can be a bit slow. Do not expect it to have blazing fast performance. As long as you remember that, this is very usable tech.

Were you to try to get the same amount of storage with USB sticks you would easily spend over $200. And with a 3.5-inch setup you have to deal with a power supply.

This is probably one of the cheapest, easiest and most useful backup solutions yet. And for those with media center computers this would also serve quite well.

Would you buy one?

Is this tech something that sounds good to you, or would you rather stay with the older 3.5-inch setups? Let us know in the comments.