Western Digital 500GB My Passport Essential now comes in limited edition designs

Western Digital’s range of portable hard drives, in particular the 500GB My Passport Essential, will now come in limited edition designs thanks to students at California State University, Long Beach’s Industrial Design program. These drives will come in Boom Box, Black Hole, Cityscape, Fuchsia Leaf and Wave decorative patterns which will target students who love standing out from the crowd while looking stylish. All the new drives will play nice with Windows, featuring WD SmartWare software that offers a visual method to perform backups of your precious data via a single-screen view of the drive’s contents. Not only that, other safety features include user-selected password protection combined with 256-bit hardware-based encryption for added peace of mind. You can pick one of the five designs up for $119.99 a pop, where they will come with 500GB worth of storage space and a 2-year limited warranty. We would have liked to see it feature USB 3.0 connectivity to keep up with the times though. [Press Release]