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Western Digital Announces Redesigned My Passport Portable Hard Drives

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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.

Western Digital My Passport
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.

Top Rated Comments

keysofanxiety Avatar
124 months ago
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.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
freediverx Avatar
124 months ago
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 we have backups.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
124 months ago
- 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?
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Celebion Avatar
124 months ago
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.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
124 months ago
Nice colours.
Reminds me of the old ZIP disks
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
SkippyThorson Avatar
124 months ago
No one's mentioned how these blatantly rip off the design of the Xbox One?

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[...]Cloud. Cloud is the answer. Just ask my buddy whose Porsche drive gave up after 2 years and took irreplaceable photos and videos with it. Sure, he could send the platters in for data recovery but that costs an exponential amount more than the drive itself.
Or something called redundant backups. Having only one backup of one's most critical data is foolish. A second backup off-site is even preferable - your home at work if secure and work at home if allowable.

I've never had a single copy of my Photos or iTunes Library, and I sure as hell don't want hundreds of GBs of my personal data on a server in Nevada. Should my Mac croak, I want to be back to working in a reasonable amount of time.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)