WD recently released an updated model of their My Passport Ultra external hard drive and here is our review.
With the My Passport line now in its 7th generation, the My Passport Ultra hard drives are now available in capacities up to 3 TB and in four colours – Classic Black, Brilliant White, Wild Berry and Noble Blue.
My Passport Ultra portable drives come in 3 TB, 2 TB, 1 TB and 500 GB capacities and feature 256-bit AES hardware encryption to protect your data from falling into the wrong hands.
What’s in the Box?
The box contains the drive, a USB 3.0 cable and a quick guide.
A Closer Look
Using the My Passport Ultra
All the software you need is actually stored on the drive itself so all you need to do is plug it in and run the WD software installer.
As part of the setup process you can select which WD drive (or Dropbox) you want to use to back up to.
You can then set up a schedule for the backups and also which files are included in the backup.
As one of the reasons you might choose to use this drive is the encryption, setting up a password to access the content of the drive is imperative, so make sure you set a password that isn’t easy to guess.
And if you think you might be having problems with the drive there are a number of utilities available to use. You can even erase the drive from here if you need to.
Performance Test
Using CrystalDiskMark on the latest Windows 10 preview build connected to a USB 3.0 port, the results show a Read speed of 113.9 MB/s and a Write speed of 113.6 MB/s.
Final Thoughts
For this review, we had the 2TB model in black to test.
The drive is small and lightweight so it can easily fit it in your pocket, and its also quiet, which is what you want for a portable drive. There is no power supply with this drive, it is powered from the USB port so you don’t need to worry about having lots to carry.
One of the biggest risks to carrying around a portable drive is that if you lose it then anything you have on the drive could be accessed by whoever finds it, so if you have anything sensitive on their or you just don’t want anyone to be able to see anything on the drive you are in luck as the drive comes with hardware based encryption. What this means is that without the password to decrypt the drive the contents are inaccessible to anyone, so you don’t have to worry about your data falling into the wrong hands if the worst happens and you lose the drive. For those who might be interested, its 256-bit AES, which is very secure. So whatever you do, make sure you use a really good password that isn’t easy to guess and don’t keep your password on a post-it note with the drive, and don’t use the password hint box to give too much away. It’s also hardware based which means that unlike software based encryption there is very little (and I do mean very little) performance impact on the drive. You can use the drive on any computer to access the drive, you don’t need to have the WD software installed on it, you just need your password. You can also choose to have the drive automatically unlock when you connect it to a known computer so that you don’t have to type in your password, but I would recommend to remain as secure as possible that you don’t use this option in case you lose the drive and the computer at the same time!
The WD backup software is very easily to setup and use and you can just sit back and let it backup your selected data without having to manually copy anything to the drive. You can of course add whatever you want to the drive as well though just by copying it over. Restoring files is just as easy – you can choose to restore a single file or an entire folder structure if necessary all at the click of a button.
Overall, if you are looking for portable drive that will keep your data safe and secure then you should definitely add a WD My Passport Ultra to your collection and then you can sleep easier at night knowing your data is both backed up and protected.
My Passport Ultra ranges in price from £59.99 up to £159.00 depending on capacity and offer a 3-year limited warranty.
You can learn more from the WD website.
