With today's plethora of downloadable media, whether it be music or films, the need for large capacity drives is growing and will only get greater. Its OK having a large capacity drive in your system but sooner or later you will want to off-load some data to give yourself space.

The capacities of external drives are getting larger to cope with the demand and the latest addition to Western Digital's popular My Book series of drives is the 500GB My Book Pro Edition (a 250GB version is also available) which not only has huge capacity but three interfaces to give you a choice of transfer speeds.

Housed in the familiar, book-shaped case, with its arrangement of cooling slots and holes that might mean something had we not forgotten all our Morse code skills, is a 500GB, 7,200rpm drive with a 16MB cache and a quoted seek time of 8.9ms.

The case is now coloured silver so it won't match the original black My Book - come on, Western Digital, choose one colour or the other - with the edges of the case covered in a thin layer of rubber to provide extra protection; useful as the My Books are portable, if a little heavy.

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On the front of the unit, or the spine if you like, are two concentric rings, each back-lit with a blue LED. Western Digital calls this a capacity gauge and it lets you know how much space you have left on the drive. Comprised of six sections, each section represents about 17 percent of disk space and it lights up in a clockwise direction.

The three interfaces built into the My Book Pro are USB 2.0, Firewire 400 and the super fast Firewire 800 (2 ports). Firewire 800 (up to 800Mbps) is becoming more widely available, whether in the form of add-in cards or, in the case of some brand new motherboards, integrated into the PCB.

So just how fast is Firewire 800 then? Well, when tested using HD Tune, the maximum transfer rate using USB 2.0 was 22.6MBps, with the FireWire 400 interface 32.5MBps but with Firewire 800 this jumped to a very impressive 62.5MBps.

Using the My Book Pro is simplicity itself: just plug it into your PC and it self-installs, and the drive comes with EMC Retrospect Express backup and recovery software to help you backup or sort out your data. Western Digital supports the My Book Pro Edition with a three year warranty.

Western Digital has also recently announced the My Book Pro Edition II, which has a second 500GB drive installed to give you a whopping 1TB of storage. Now there's a challenge: see how quickly you can fill that up...

If you want loads of storage space for your downloaded files, or want to back up data with blindingly fast transfer speeds (with the Firewire 800 interface), then the My Book Pro Edition is the drive for you.