UPDATE: This review was changed in October, 2012 to reflect new pricing, and to update the photo with the drive's new case design.

These tiny My Passport drives from Western Digital earn our recommendation for a few reasons. They're extremely small and portable, they're capable of both USB 2.0 and 3.0 speeds, and priced between $90 and $180, they're quite affordable.

Sure, you can get a 2TB desktop drive from WD, Hitachi or Seagate for close to the same amount of money as a 1TB My Passport drive, but the other options are much larger and require external power supplies. If you want the ultimate in grab-and-go mobility, these little bricks are a great choice.

The My Passport drive works on both Macs and Windows PC, and comes with a 2-year warranty. The drives are USB-powered (there are no external power cables) and come in a few different colors. Western Digital also offers some add-on software for data encryption, and a backup suite with a few different backup options. 500GB models are about $70, 750GB models are around $90, and 1TB models are about $100. 2TB, the biggest the My Passport you can buy, costs between $160 and $180 at different retailers.

The new case design is quite snappy, and one of the choices of colors is a silvery brushed-metal case that matches the current Mac notebooks and desktops.

The company also recently released the My Passport Edge, an even slimmer drive that offers better portability. We'll review one of those as soon as we can get our hands on one.

WIRED Extreme portability. No external power supplies or power cables required. You can set up password protection and hardware encryption.

TIRED Fast enough for everyday use, but not the fastest. Not the cheapest, either.