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WD redesigns its best selling My Passport Ultra portable HDDs

by Mark Tyson on 27 May 2015, 14:31

Tags: WD (NYSE:WDC)

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WD, a Western Digital company, has today introduced its seventh generation My Passport Ultra portable hard drives for PC and My Passport drives for Mac. The updated drive range is available straight away, in a range of capacities up to 3TB and choice of four colours. WD has also introduced a new accessory, designed to personalise and protect your portable drive, it's called the WD Grip Pack.

Backups are very important and having an easily portable backup, as facilitated by these kinds of portable 2.5-inch hard drives, is a plus. A senior WD representative says that the backup experience is easier than ever with the built-in WD Backup software on Windows systems. Furthermore the greater capacities and hardware-based encryption are expected to be a boon.

The new My Passport Ultra drives and My Passport for Mac portable drives will be made available in 3TB, 2TB, and 1TB capacities. The PC version is also available in 500GB . They use 256-bit AES hardware encryption and connect to your computer via USB 3.0 (USB 2.0 backwards compatible). My Passport Ultra drives are available in four colours; Classic Black, Brilliant White, Wild Berry and Noble Blue. The Mac version is black-only.

WD Grip Packs will start to become available in June. Looking at WD's supplied pictures and description, these are basically 'bumpers' for the portable drives. Grip Packs will be made available in five colours; smoke, slate, grape, sky and fuchsia. Buyers will receive a colour-matched 18-inch long flat USB 3.0 cable in the box. A WD Bumper Pack will carry an RRP of £9.99.

All of the WD My Passport Ultra and portable for Mac drives (except the 3TB capacity drives) are available from today, directly from the WD Store and retailers such as Amazon. Prices range from £59.99 to £159. The 3TB capacity My Drive SKUs will become available next month. Buyers of these backup solutions receive a 3 year warranty.

HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

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Posted by CustardInc - Wed 27 May 2015 15:34
Looks about the same size as my Passport from many years ago…
Posted by Unique - Thu 28 May 2015 06:31
is that a 2.5" 3tb drive? i never knew these were close to production. i presume it's not 2 drives in one caddy as otherwise you could get 4tb with 2 x 2tb drives
Posted by crossy - Thu 28 May 2015 11:14
Unique
is that a 2.5" 3tb drive? i never knew these were close to production. i presume it's not 2 drives in one caddy as otherwise you could get 4tb with 2 x 2tb drives
Looks like 2.5" 3TB drives to me. Just checked the Passport Ultra's spec page versus one for a 3.5" WD Green drive and a 2.5 WD Blue: (H x D x W)
GRN: 26.10 x 147.0 x 101.60
PPU: 20.96 x 110.0 x 81.57
BLU: 9.50 x 100.2 x 69.85
As you can see, the Passport is smaller in all dimensions than the 3.5“, but larger than the 2.5” by an amount that could easily be the case material and interface. Interesting to see that the 2.5 WD Green seems to have been dropped - so no “eco” option for small NAS's or laptops. :(
Posted by Unique - Thu 28 May 2015 13:10
crossy
Looks like 2.5" 3TB drives to me. Just checked the Passport Ultra's spec page versus one for a 3.5" WD Green drive and a 2.5 WD Blue: (H x D x W)
GRN: 26.10 x 147.0 x 101.60
PPU: 20.96 x 110.0 x 81.57
BLU: 9.50 x 100.2 x 69.85
As you can see, the Passport is smaller in all dimensions than the 3.5“, but larger than the 2.5” by an amount that could easily be the case material and interface. Interesting to see that the 2.5 WD Green seems to have been dropped - so no “eco” option for small NAS's or laptops. :(

if it means 2.5" 9mm drives of 3tb I can update my laptop again sooner than I expected, and even consider one of the combi drives with 128gb SSD+1tb HDD for the boot drive. once the price has came down a bit though
Posted by crossy - Fri 29 May 2015 08:42
Unique
if it means 2.5" 9mm drives of 3tb I can update my laptop again sooner than I expected, and even consider one of the combi drives with 128gb SSD+1tb HDD for the boot drive. once the price has came down a bit though
If by “combi drive” you mean a WD Black 2 then I'd consider that decision very carefully - I've seen quite a few postings about problems with it. It's a non-starter as far as I'm concerned anyway because it's Windows-only.

I realise that this might get me horribly flamed - but I've had good experiences with the Seagate “hybrid” drives. I replaced an abysmally performing WD Black with a 1TB (3.5“) SSHD for my ”data" partition (where the user account files etc are stored) and the responsiveness of the machine went way up (rest of the disks are all SSDs). Good thing about the Seagate (and Toshiba?) SSHD's is that although they probably won't perform as well as a Black2 overall, they're a 1/3 of the price and work with any OS - so to me, they're a good halfway house on the way to full SSD-enablement.

Other thing to consider is whether your laptop actually needs more than 500GB of space (NAS boxes are cheap and readily available!). I actually downsized my main (Linux) machine and manage to fit my OS etc on a 128GB SSD. What I'm suggesting is that for the price of the Black2 (£179 according to Scan) you can easily get a proper SSD, albeit one of only 500GB. Less space, but also no need to go mucking around with WD's drivers etc. Sorry if I'm dissing the Black2, but I really see it as a dead-end product.

Although, if I was flush enough to be able to afford £200 for the Black2, then stretching the budget by another £100 gets me into 1TB SSD territory… just saying :innocent:

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