I just bought a Western Digital Passport 3 Studio 500GB external drive to use with my Macbook Pro (Pre-October MBP with 2.4GHz, 2GB ram, matte screen). I paid about $200 for it. The drive comes with support for Firewire 800 (included cable and port on drive), Firewire 400 (via included adapter cable which uses the same port on the drive) and USB 2.0 (included cable and separate port on drive). It comes pre-formatted for use with the Mac (HFS+ Journaled) but will also work with a Windows machine if reformatted. It uses power from the host computer's bus so if you use a USB hub, it must be a powered hub unless you supply separate power to the drive for which it does include a jack, but no power supply as you are expected to power off the bus of the computer.
The drive inside is a 7200RPM 2.5" laptop style drive and the overall enclosure is not much bigger than the drive itself. The drive casing also features a 4 LED display to indicate when the drive is in use, sleeping, powered up and if a special driver is installed, how full it is by various flashing methods. The drive also comes with special "turbo" drivers for OS X. Both are pre-installed on the drive itself. There is no driver disc included so if you are going to partition it, be sure and save these files and the manual to your primary drive first or they will be deleted.
The drive is stated to be Time Machine compatible and OS X did offer to use the drive for backups when plugged in, but I prefer to use Carbon Copy Cloner and WinClone to backup the MBP's drives so I can't verify operation. I personally repartitioned the drives so I could have a 200GB bootable backup of the internal laptop drive and this worked fine. I used Winclone to backup my BootCamp partition to a secondary partition and also created an extra Windows partition (formatted in Windows) for any large games I might want to install. This brings to mind a severe limitation (at least out of the box) of OS X and that is it cannot WRITE to NTFS drives. It can only read them. This can cause real headaches if you want to share information on this drive directly between your Mac and a Windows computer or even to directly access your Bootcamp partition (unless you used Fat32). I can write to NTFS from my PC with Linux on it so I don't know why Apple cannot overcome this limitation unless it's a licensing issue in which case I think they ought to go ahead and license it as they did Exchange for the sake of easy compatibility. If you use Fat32, it'll work OK but this is not idea for XP and some versions of XP will not let you use Fat32 for an install anyway (not sure about Vista).
I did some speed testing with XBench. I ran it using all three interfaces on the Macbook Pro and I also ran it again on my upgraded PowerMac 1.8GHz 7448 G4 with 1.5GB of memory and Sonnet Sata + 7200 RPM drive which runs both Tiger and Leopard for some OS and machine comparisons. I'll not bore you with long pages of individual test numbers, but just give the summary scores and a few comments. The Macbook Pro is running Leopard 10.5.6. The PowerMac is running Tiger 10.4.11 and Leopard 10.5.6. I did test with and without the turbo drivers and the pre-turbo driver scores are listed first (except I didn't think to test the MBP without Turbo for FW 400 or USB 2 as I wasn't originally planning a comparison to the PowerMac or expecting such drastic differences in some areas or even contemplating a review originally for that matter).
XBench Drive Scores
MBP Internal Drive Reference (5200RPM): 39.31
PowerMac Internal Drive Reference (7200RPM) Tiger: 74.46
PowerMac Internal Drive Reference (7200RPM) Leopard: 68.28
FW800 Tests
MBP Passport FW800: 52.59 Turbo: 54.55
FW400 Tests
MBP Passport FW400 Turbo: 45.68
PowerMac Tiger FW400: 37.03 Turbo: 49.30
PowerMac Leopard FW 400: 31.83 Turbo: 48.5
USB 2.0 Tests
MBP Passport USB2 Turbo : 40.91
PowerMac Tiger USB2: 12.51 Turbo: 17.62 (*)
PowerMac Leopard USB2: 34.11 Turbo: 35.74
* With the turbo driver, only the uncached 4k read was still VERY low; most of the other numbers were only a little lower than in Leopard, but clearly that one score still dragged the overall score way down. The pre-turbo driver is less than half the speed of Leopard with or without turbo. Either way, USB 2.0 is a poor option for Tiger compared to FW400 with this drive. Leopard seems to have addressed the poor USB 2.0 driver problem.
Conclusions
As you can see, the drive itself is noticeably faster than the MBP's internal drive when using FW800 and somewhat faster with FW400 and about the same using USB 2.0 overall. Some numbers in the 800 test were over 2x faster than either FW400 or USB 2.0 while the smaller transfer rates were less dissimilar and hence the uneven scoring. USB 2.0 is only slightly slower (probably due to overhead) than FW400 with the MBP, but FW400 rules the day on the PowerMac compared to USB 2.0 in Leopard.
In Tiger on the PowerMac, there is clearly a MAJOR USB 2.0 driver issue as it's MUCH SLOWER than Firewire there and yet you can clearly see the driver issue has been resolved in Leopard for the PowerMac as its pre-turbo USB 2.0 score beats its pre-turbo Leopard FW400 score and comes close to Tiger's pre-turbo FW400 speed test. It's a shame that Apple didn't fix Tiger's USB driver problems after it addressed them in Leopard's development (some Bluetooth driver limitations also come to mind as well) because otherwise, Tiger is still the faster operating system for my PPC machine and has Classic support as well so I'm reluctant to switch to Leopard full time yet on it. Surprisingly, though, the PowerMac beat the much faster MBP in the FW400 tests (in either operating system). I suppose this shows Firewire has little to no overhead whereas clearly the MBP wins in the USB 2.0 area (where the CPU can affect the outcome).
What the summary doesn't show is that several of the FW800 individual test scores were double that of FW400. The high PowerMac FW400 scores only seem close because the drive punishing tests (where the drive is going slower overall than what the output of the interface could matter) is the same or even in the PowerMac's favor slightly. Suffice to say, for large files, the FW800 interface clearly makes a big difference. I can't really explain why the PowerMac beats the MBP tit for tat with FW400 scores. The Tiger Turbo score is scarily close to the pre-turbo FW800 score overall (it actually beat the FW800 4k write cache numbers!). Maybe there's an anomaly there like something happening in the background on the MBP? Or perhaps the PPC Firewire implementation is somehow better than the FW800 interface used on the MBP when reduced to FW400 speeds? In any case, the PowerMac's internal Sata drives (powered by a Sonnet Sata PCI card) wipe the floor here as the MBP's own drive and the Passport at FW800 speeds don't even come CLOSE to it, especially in Tiger.
But for use with a MBP, this drive will make a handy backup drive and still leave room for more when on the go. You can even boot off it instead of the internal drive after making Carbon Copy Clone of it for a nice little improvement in performance. It runs off the bus power, so there's no need for any power outlets and it's small enough to easily fit into a laptop bag. It costs a little bit more than the other Western Digital external drives of this size, but for a MBP, the FW800 interface is easily worth it, in my opinion. Longevity of the drive remains to be seen, however.
The drive inside is a 7200RPM 2.5" laptop style drive and the overall enclosure is not much bigger than the drive itself. The drive casing also features a 4 LED display to indicate when the drive is in use, sleeping, powered up and if a special driver is installed, how full it is by various flashing methods. The drive also comes with special "turbo" drivers for OS X. Both are pre-installed on the drive itself. There is no driver disc included so if you are going to partition it, be sure and save these files and the manual to your primary drive first or they will be deleted.
The drive is stated to be Time Machine compatible and OS X did offer to use the drive for backups when plugged in, but I prefer to use Carbon Copy Cloner and WinClone to backup the MBP's drives so I can't verify operation. I personally repartitioned the drives so I could have a 200GB bootable backup of the internal laptop drive and this worked fine. I used Winclone to backup my BootCamp partition to a secondary partition and also created an extra Windows partition (formatted in Windows) for any large games I might want to install. This brings to mind a severe limitation (at least out of the box) of OS X and that is it cannot WRITE to NTFS drives. It can only read them. This can cause real headaches if you want to share information on this drive directly between your Mac and a Windows computer or even to directly access your Bootcamp partition (unless you used Fat32). I can write to NTFS from my PC with Linux on it so I don't know why Apple cannot overcome this limitation unless it's a licensing issue in which case I think they ought to go ahead and license it as they did Exchange for the sake of easy compatibility. If you use Fat32, it'll work OK but this is not idea for XP and some versions of XP will not let you use Fat32 for an install anyway (not sure about Vista).
I did some speed testing with XBench. I ran it using all three interfaces on the Macbook Pro and I also ran it again on my upgraded PowerMac 1.8GHz 7448 G4 with 1.5GB of memory and Sonnet Sata + 7200 RPM drive which runs both Tiger and Leopard for some OS and machine comparisons. I'll not bore you with long pages of individual test numbers, but just give the summary scores and a few comments. The Macbook Pro is running Leopard 10.5.6. The PowerMac is running Tiger 10.4.11 and Leopard 10.5.6. I did test with and without the turbo drivers and the pre-turbo driver scores are listed first (except I didn't think to test the MBP without Turbo for FW 400 or USB 2 as I wasn't originally planning a comparison to the PowerMac or expecting such drastic differences in some areas or even contemplating a review originally for that matter).
XBench Drive Scores
MBP Internal Drive Reference (5200RPM): 39.31
PowerMac Internal Drive Reference (7200RPM) Tiger: 74.46
PowerMac Internal Drive Reference (7200RPM) Leopard: 68.28
FW800 Tests
MBP Passport FW800: 52.59 Turbo: 54.55
FW400 Tests
MBP Passport FW400 Turbo: 45.68
PowerMac Tiger FW400: 37.03 Turbo: 49.30
PowerMac Leopard FW 400: 31.83 Turbo: 48.5
USB 2.0 Tests
MBP Passport USB2 Turbo : 40.91
PowerMac Tiger USB2: 12.51 Turbo: 17.62 (*)
PowerMac Leopard USB2: 34.11 Turbo: 35.74
* With the turbo driver, only the uncached 4k read was still VERY low; most of the other numbers were only a little lower than in Leopard, but clearly that one score still dragged the overall score way down. The pre-turbo driver is less than half the speed of Leopard with or without turbo. Either way, USB 2.0 is a poor option for Tiger compared to FW400 with this drive. Leopard seems to have addressed the poor USB 2.0 driver problem.
Conclusions
As you can see, the drive itself is noticeably faster than the MBP's internal drive when using FW800 and somewhat faster with FW400 and about the same using USB 2.0 overall. Some numbers in the 800 test were over 2x faster than either FW400 or USB 2.0 while the smaller transfer rates were less dissimilar and hence the uneven scoring. USB 2.0 is only slightly slower (probably due to overhead) than FW400 with the MBP, but FW400 rules the day on the PowerMac compared to USB 2.0 in Leopard.
In Tiger on the PowerMac, there is clearly a MAJOR USB 2.0 driver issue as it's MUCH SLOWER than Firewire there and yet you can clearly see the driver issue has been resolved in Leopard for the PowerMac as its pre-turbo USB 2.0 score beats its pre-turbo Leopard FW400 score and comes close to Tiger's pre-turbo FW400 speed test. It's a shame that Apple didn't fix Tiger's USB driver problems after it addressed them in Leopard's development (some Bluetooth driver limitations also come to mind as well) because otherwise, Tiger is still the faster operating system for my PPC machine and has Classic support as well so I'm reluctant to switch to Leopard full time yet on it. Surprisingly, though, the PowerMac beat the much faster MBP in the FW400 tests (in either operating system). I suppose this shows Firewire has little to no overhead whereas clearly the MBP wins in the USB 2.0 area (where the CPU can affect the outcome).
What the summary doesn't show is that several of the FW800 individual test scores were double that of FW400. The high PowerMac FW400 scores only seem close because the drive punishing tests (where the drive is going slower overall than what the output of the interface could matter) is the same or even in the PowerMac's favor slightly. Suffice to say, for large files, the FW800 interface clearly makes a big difference. I can't really explain why the PowerMac beats the MBP tit for tat with FW400 scores. The Tiger Turbo score is scarily close to the pre-turbo FW800 score overall (it actually beat the FW800 4k write cache numbers!). Maybe there's an anomaly there like something happening in the background on the MBP? Or perhaps the PPC Firewire implementation is somehow better than the FW800 interface used on the MBP when reduced to FW400 speeds? In any case, the PowerMac's internal Sata drives (powered by a Sonnet Sata PCI card) wipe the floor here as the MBP's own drive and the Passport at FW800 speeds don't even come CLOSE to it, especially in Tiger.
But for use with a MBP, this drive will make a handy backup drive and still leave room for more when on the go. You can even boot off it instead of the internal drive after making Carbon Copy Clone of it for a nice little improvement in performance. It runs off the bus power, so there's no need for any power outlets and it's small enough to easily fit into a laptop bag. It costs a little bit more than the other Western Digital external drives of this size, but for a MBP, the FW800 interface is easily worth it, in my opinion. Longevity of the drive remains to be seen, however.