Western Digital Announces Redesigned My Passport Portable Hard Drives

[MacRumors]

Western Digital yesterday refreshed its popular portable and desktop hard drive range with a more colorful line-up and increased capacities.

As part of a "reimagined" design that WD says better reflects how data is now "much more of a personal commodity", the company's portable USB 2.0/3.0 My Passport drives are available in six vivid colors - Black, Yellow, Red, White, Orange and Blue. The Black color is available pre-formatted for Mac systems, while all the others need reformatting to HFS + Journaled Mac to work with Apple hardware.

The My Passport drives can be had in 1TB ($79.99), 2TB ($94.99), 3TB ($129.99), and 4TB ($139.99) storage capacities.

Meanwhile, the company's redesigned My Book USB 3.0 desktop storage solution will soon be available in 3TB ($129.99), 4TB ($129.99?), 6TB ($199.99), and 8TB ($249.99) capacities, and is compatible with Mac and Windows systems out of the box.

All the WD drives come with an Auto backup schedule feature as part of the Time Machine-compatible WD Backup software, as well as password protection, 256-bit AES hardware encryption tools, and a two-year warranty.

In conjunction with the new HD drives, for the first time Western Digital also announced a range of internal SSD drives for desktop and laptop PC computers.

Article Link: Western Digital Announces Redesigned My Passport Portable Hard Drives

 

[maflynn]

Don't like the colors, I found the drive (the older generation) to be a bit slow, but it does serve a purpose (backups)

 

[keysofanxiety]

Storing all your stuff on an 8TB HDD is playing with fire IMO. I just don't trust the technology. With a single drop your data could be destroyed.

Plus WD's reliability has never been great for me. That's only in my experience though. YMMV.

 

[Exile714]

No Thunderbolt 3? I have a sinking feeling I'm about to buy a Thunderbolt 3 laptop (hint, hint, Apple... lets release those MacBook Pros now). And the way I see it, there are only three things anyone could use Thunderbolt 3 for where other port protocols are inferior: display connections, multi-device docks... and storage.

So for that reason, I'll pass.

 

[cube]

- Drives in colors: who cares
- Pre-built external drives: who cares
- 5400 RPM hard drives: stay away
- 2TB laptop self-contained hybrid drives: WHERE?
- 2TB laptop 7200 RPM hard drives: WHERE?
- Laptop 7200 RPM self-contained hybrid drives: WHERE?
- 3TB laptop (hybrid) hard drives: WHERE?

 

[JaySoul]

Nice colours.

 

[maflynn]

No Thunderbolt 3?

Too soon, there's really no one out there with TB3 yet.

 

[peterh988]

Nice colours.

Reminds me of the old ZIP disks

 

[Michael Scrip]

Storing all your stuff on an 8TB HDD is playing with fire IMO. I just don't trust the technology. With a single drop your data could be destroyed.

That's why you buy two of them!

Plus WD's reliability has never been great for me. That's only in my experience though. YMMV.

I've got seven WD 3.5" desktop drives humming along... and two WD portable drives.

Am I lucky?

 

[rudychidiac]

These look great, I recently bought a my Passport 2TB one, I should've waited a bit...

 

[dpace32]

IIRC these are very difficult to restore data from if (when) an issue comes up because of the build in hardware encryption...

https://community.wd.com/t/wd-my-book-duo-data-forever-lost-if-drive-enclosure-dies/6496/9

 

[840quadra]

Glad to see them still working on this line. Funny that I see WD in better light than Seagate. Despite having friends and family employed by seagate locally, after 4 drive failures in the last two years, I need a long break from their products.

 

[keysofanxiety]

I've got seven WD 3.5" desktop drives humming along... and two WD portable drives.

Am I lucky?

Maybe I'm just unlucky! I tend to be the exception to the rule in most cases.

Who's got two thumbs and gets all the DOA drives? This guy.

 

[Kobayagi]

I was very close to buying a (full name): WD My Passport Ultra Metal Edition 3TB Zilver
Over here, in The Netherlands, is about €158

Maybe I'll wait a bit to see what the price does or if these new ones are at the same price point. The red is looking nice, kinda different for a change.

 

[Celebion]

I cannot recommend WD portable drives. They don't use sata drive connectors. The USB connector is soldered onto the PCB.
So if the port breaks or the controller, all your data is lost forever.

 

[okboy]

These look just as thick as the current model, and don't even have USB-C. There are far smaller designs our there that have better connectivity.

 

[Kajje]

I cannot recommend WD portable drives. They don't use sata drive connectors. The USB connector is soldered onto the PCB.
So if the port breaks or the controller, all your data is lost forever.

True, they are soldered. But in the way the SATA connector is soldered. I don't see this as a huge disadvantage, be it that you can't transplant them into those old laptops.

We have a ton of these at the office. From all generations since the 2TB version came out. I alone have 5 or more in my drawer. Many travel to the moon and back, every year, at the bottom of our backpacks. Not one single one of them has crashed or acted strange. Good stuff.

 

[Porco]

They look like the unholy offspring of a PS4 and an XBox One. They should call them the 'P-Box 5'. Especially the yellow one.

 

[Mr. Donahue]

I've been wanting to buy one but I always run into negative comments about WG. I need something to back up my MacBook Pro. I feel vulnerable. If I'm not someone who drops things or even plans on leaving the house with it. Would anyone recommend it? Any trusted backups that are Mac compatible out the package that are reliable out there?

 

[RightMACatU]

With my TM inexplicably finding 10-20GB to backup every time I connect it a 4 or 6GB is welcome.

 

[netwalker]

When product managers are running out of ideas and technical innovations they change the design and that is usually a bad sign. They are selling old technology in a new jacket.

Where are USB Type-C/USB 3.1 Gen 1 drives and better USB 3.1 Gen 2 with fast ssd or raid (like the old My Passport Pro)? Seems like WD leaves those to their overpriced g-technology brand.

 

[chrono1081]

I've got seven WD 3.5" desktop drives humming along... and two WD portable drives.
Am I lucky?

Honestly, yes. Very.

Hopefully their drive quality improved in the last several years but between 2007 - 2010 we stopped buying all WD drives in our hardware contracts because of the enormously high failure rate. We literally (not figuratively) had an room full of failed WD drives.

The internal drives were easy enough to figure out but the passports and their desktop backup drives were a bit more work. Often times it wasn't the drive itself that died, but the enclosure. The problem is breaking open the enclosure revealed that they used some custom type of connector between the drive and the enclosure, you couldn't just pop the drive out, put it in a caddy and see if it worked.

We had some luck taking the chip of the bottom of a standard WD internal drive and replacing the custom connector on the drive in the external enclosure with that but it seemed to be a crap shoot at best.

To this day I avoid them.
[doublepost=1476274155][/doublepost]

Maybe I'm just unlucky! I tend to be the exception to the rule in most cases.

Who's got two thumbs and gets all the DOA drives? This guy.

You're not alone...we had hundreds of them at my last job.

 

[netwalker]

I've got seven WD 3.5" desktop drives humming along... and two WD portable drives.

Am I lucky?

After some negative experiences with Seagate and LaCie I have been buying WD internal and external drives only and so far had no problems. As portable drives go through a lot I don't expect them to last a decade of course. Important things of course have backups.

 

[cube]

What I want is WD to let HGST be, and not start crippling those products too.

 

[Celebion]

True, they are soldered. But in the way the SATA connector is soldered. I don't see this as a huge disadvantage, be it that you can't transplant them into those old laptops.

We have a ton of these at the office. From all generations since the 2TB version came out. I alone have 5 or more in my drawer. Many travel to the moon and back, every year, at the bottom of our backpacks. Not one single one of them has crashed or acted strange. Good stuff.

I've had three of those drives that either crashed or had faulty USB connectors.

A USB-A port could have remedied at least the broken port issue.