Ease into Windows 8 with My Passport Enterprise portable drive

Wondering if you should upgrade to Windows 8? WD has teamed up with Microsoft to offer a quick solution for business users.

The company announced today that its My Passport Enterprise portable drive is now Windows To Go-certified and will be available on the same day as Windows 8, which is Friday.

In a nutshell, the drive comes with Windows 8 Enterprise environment pre-configured on it and makes it possible to provision a fully featured Windows 8 work space on a bootable USB drive. In other words, you can take this drive, plug it into any computer running Windows 7 or earlier, boot from it, and immediately use Windows 8 as though the new operating system were installed on the computer itself.

Note, however, that Windows To Go is only available with the Windows 8 Enterprise edition and can only be provisioned by person/organization who has Microsoft Software Assurance for Windows, or a Windows Companion Subscription License. Basically, this means regular consumers can't just go buy a My Passport Enterprise portable drive and expect to have this features, unfortunately.

Like the regular version of the recently reviewed My Passport Edge, the My Passport Enterprise portable drive has a capacity of 500GB, large enough to host Windows 8 itself plus a lot of data for mobile users.

WD says the drive also features BitLocker full-disk encryption and keeps data on the My Passport Enterprise separate from the host PC's internal hard drive to avoid any accidental data security breach.

WD says the My Passport Enterprise comes with a two-year warranty and is slated to cost $120.