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Western Digital has refreshed its 'My Passport' range of portable hard drives, including a 2TB version. The redesigned drives come in a choice of five sizes and five colors and come bundled with WD's own automatic backup and security software, to allow secure data use on-the-move.
WD 2TB My Passport for Mac Portable External Hard Drive, USB-C/USB-A. WD 2TB Black My Passport Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0. WD My Passport (Fall 2016, 2TB, Orange) wdbyft0020bor. Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim Portable External Hard Drive. CNET USB 3.0 portable drive performance. Seagate Expansion.
All the models, which start at a cost of $129.99, feature USB 3.0/2.0 connection for fast data transfer. Press Release WD ® SHIPS FIRST 2 TB PORTABLE HARD DRIVE WITH NEXT-GEN MY PASSPORT ® World’s Top-Selling External Storage Solution Gets Capacity Boost, Premium New Design, Improved Signature Features of Security and Automatic Backup IRVINE, Calif. 20, 2012 – ® (NYSE: WDC) today announced the next generation of its top-selling ® line of portable hard drives, offering consumers a fresh new enclosure design and the first-ever 2 TB capacity in a portable drive. Now available in five popular colors: white, black, silver, blue, and red, with a range of capacities beginning from 500 GB, the new sleeker My Passport portable drives offer digital consumers an appealing array of storage options that reflect their personal style. Additionally, the new My Passport drives offer™ automatic backup software and WD Security™ for password protection and hardware encryption.
With the addition of premium finishes, specially-engineered to make the outer shell more resistant to scratches and fingerprints, the new My Passport external drives feature ultra-fast USB 3.0 connectivity; USB 2.0 compatibility; continuous, automatic backup software; and password protection with hardware encryption. The included software offers the flexibility to customize the drive to a user’s storage preferences: installing all features, just the components needed, or using the drive without the software. The new 2 TB model offers massive capacity in an amazing pocket-sized enclosure, affording plenty of secure storage for all of one’s photos, video, music and other important files. Given the small form factor and easy portability of My Passport drives, the built-in security features of password protection and hardware encryption help protect files from unauthorized use, making the drives safe data repositories for data while offering peace of mind to busy consumers on the go.
“More than money, jewelry and other valuables, the item most missed if ever lost or stolen is one’s computer – and everything on it – so our goal in launching the next-generation of the popular My Passport drives is to encourage more consumers to protect their data before something happens,” said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager of WD’s branded products and consumer electronics groups. “The new My Passport makes backing up and preserving one’s digital life easier, reliable and more secure than ever – it’s the perfect blend of monstrous capacity, reliability and user-friendly technology in a sleek form factor, now in five colors.” Pricing and Availability My Passport drives come with a 2-year limited warranty are available online at the WD store at and at select retailers and distributors. MSRP is $129.99 USD for 500 GB, $149.99 USD for 750 GB, $179.99 USD for 1 TB, $199.99 for 1.5 TB and $249.99 USD for the new 2 TB edition. Additional information on the My Passport family of hard drives can be found at.
If you're using both Mac and Windows PC (I'm on Mac with Bootcamp, so i'm on windows partition at time of this post) Basically, most macs without the NTFS-3G driver will not recognize NTFS-formatted drives, so if the driver goes bonk, the only workaround here is to splice off a part of the 2TB hard drive to be formatted in FAT32, which works with both Windows and OSX. The hardware is the same between macs/PCs, software is the only thing different. Anyway, on my 2TB, i have a 97gb fat32 partition, so it becomes a temporary holding place until i can move it over to the main NTFS partition. Blah blah blah.
Basically, so there. I have two WD hard drives (1T and 2T), plus I bought one 1T each for my two daughters. They have all failed. I can't update the software, because my computer just stops 'seeing' it.
I had to do a system restore to remove the new driver. The LiveDrive 2T is never live, and most of the time just continually connects and disconnects even on a good day. I can't connect directly because it doesn't work that way. I can only use the Essentials 1T as a giant flashdrive, because the backup software never works. What matters is the actual throughput. For example, a 5400RPM drive with newer higher density technology can have higher throughput than an older 7200RPM drive, if the higher density means the head passes over more information per second than on a specific higher RPM but lower density drive.
As for the connection speed, it's always versus the drive throughput. You might be right about 5400RPM USB3 being faster than 7200RPM USB 2, because USB2 is so slow it might bottleneck any modern drive. Also, most connection speeds are fiction to start with. You'll never see USB2 hit 480 megabits per second in real world use. Due to the architectural differences, it is common to see 'slower' FireWire 400 (400 mb/sec theoretical max) have a higher real world throughput than '480 mb/sec' USB 2.0, because USB speed is so easily pulled down by all kinds of factors like slow devices on the bus.
And both will be somewhat below their theoretical maximums (Firewire 400 will be lower than 400). Seriously, since you don't need a driver, the Mac instructions should be 1. Just exactly how complicated are you trying to make it?
(Ok, ok, if they ship it as a Windows-formatted drive, it would be good to mention that you should format it in Disk Utility as HFS+ for Mac, which takes about all of 3 seconds. And you can add that it needs to be manually unmounted from OS X before being unplugged. But you're still reaching if you want to write a manual that would be more than one page.). Western Digital assembles over half of their hard drives in Thailand, in facilities that were ravaged by the floods last October (that also hit Nikon and Sony hard). Seagate, the other major HDD manufacturer, also manufacturers a large portion of their hard drives in Thailand, but their facilities were on higher ground so Seagate didn't suffer as much.
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Predictions of 'supply is recovering and prices should drop again' have been going on for a month. Last Friday, Forbes joined in, with the added twist of 'demand is dropping, too'.
Vitruvius - it is a legitimate request. But not for speed, for versatility. My drives with multiple interfaces on them (FireWire, USB, eSATA) are much easier to move between various Macs and PCs than my single-interface drives where you'd better have that one type of plug or you're SOL. On Mac laptops (which occupy 3 of 5 spots in the top 5 selling laptops on Amazon.com, probably higher percentage among photographers) you only get 2 USB 2.0 ports and a Thunderbolt port, so if you want to take advantage of the drive speed, the USB 2 ports will not help you. So Thunderbolt.yeah, most of my externals are SeaG with zero issues, but my one 160gb WD drive that I've had forever has been solid too. Same with my pair of 75gb raptors. When I went to an SSD I kept them around for caching in PS.
Zero issues with any of it. In fact, I've only had two issues with any sort of storage, ever.
I had a Transcend 16gb card fail-Transcend replaced the three year old card, no questions asked. I have one 4gb Pretec card that didn't like my D70, but has worked flawlessly in everything else.