Hey guys so I just picked up a 320 gb My Passport Essential from Target for $75.  I'm trying to figure out if it did a good purchase.  Best Buys site has 500gb drives for $35 more, which 180gb's extra isn't too shabby.  But I noticed some guy making a complaint that the newer 500gb drives are using a USB Hard drive instead of a SATA drive.  
 
Should I be happy I got a SATA drive in mine or should I be going for the extra memory and not care about it using a pure USB Hard Drive?
 
Also this drive is for back up purposes.  I'm a graphic designer and want to back up my work files so reliability is a big deal.  If the quality is better with one type of Hard Drive over the other I would rather have the better quality over the bigger size.  
 
Any advice would be appreciated.
 

Hard drives aren't "USB", the connection type can be only USB however. The 2 main form factors in consumer hard drives are SATA and IDE generally with 2 main sizes 2.5" (laptop) and 3.5" (desktop) drives. If you mean that the drive cannot be removed from the cage for any reason that is another story. You can get better and cheaper drives online and I would suggest going with a brand/model that supports USB, Firewire, Firewire800 and eSATA for professional usage. You can also simply backup on your own system if you dont need the portability simply run a striped raid on your storage drive (if you are doing progessional graphic work you will have a seperate disk for scratch and it won't be on your OS/App drive) and just back up that way.
 
However do not go from reviews on bestbuy or target as the people are generally only consumer with little to no knowledge on the subject.

It means that while the drive is still sata it isn't bogged down by a bridge that converts the signal from SATA to USB, its some technology that speeds up the drive. However I have used those mini-USB only WD Passports at work before when clients bring them in and they are terrible for transfering over large gigs of video; they run VERRRRRRRRRRRY HOT and due to that I had to put things over in chunks and blow a fan on it. It's fine for small files and not running 24/7 but I was moving 200gigs of Standard Def footage onto it and having issues. It's a nice sleek looking drive and probably good for personal use and maybe graphic work as long as you aren't working with huge vector AI files and stuff.

Hmmm yea basically all I want to use it for is backup. So it sounds like you don't really like the WD Passports, have you seen other models work better?  Right now my computer only allows 2 internal hard drives so I was really wanting to get certain files off the 2 drives i have. 
 
I don't really want to burn a ton of DVD's, because those are easy to lose...  At least thats what I have found..   So thats not much of a option
 
Now do you think the 500gb with this new technology is just as good as the old ones?  It seems like I really only have to decide if I want 320gb or 500gb.

We use G-Raid drives here a lot at work, they are probably more expensive as they have eSATA, FW800 and USB Ports and are heavily designed for Mac usage (but are PC compatiable), honestly you can build your own external drive fairly cheap but the WD Passports are fine for backup purposes but nothing longer than a few gigs to transfer at a time, afterwards you are going to want to unplug it so it doesn't overheat and randomly unmount it self like I had the experience of dealing with.
 
Newer technology is probably better and the thing that makes that drive good is that its bus powered meaning you don't need an AC adapter so if you need to take it on the go with you its light and portable; if you build your own external it will most likely require AC power as the Passport is only a laptop drive in a shell with a usb cable.

Cool thanks Subject2Change, I thought it would be good for backup purposes.