A cooler place for your stuff
The revamped My Passport portable hard drives from western digital are cooler and more secure
WESTERN Digital has redesigned its popular My Passport portable hard drives – they’re now sleeker, lighter, in a range of vibrant colours and carry extra security features.
The external hard drives look a lot more stylish now with smooth tops and curved bottoms and their bright colours – red, blue, yellow and orange in addition to white and black – come with matching data cables. Choose the colour that goes with your laptop, your lifestyle or your mood.
Comfortably held in the hand, each My Passport drive measures 81.5x110mm. The one-terabyte model is 16.3mm in thickness and the 2TB, 3TB and 4TB units not much chubbier at 21.5mm.
You get WD Backup software that can automatically copy and save photos, videos and documents from computer to portable drive or do so according to your preferred schedule.
The built-in 256-bit AES hardware encryption with WD security software protects your confidential information. In case you ever lose your drive, you can stop the finder from opening it – and maybe get it back – by entering your address as the password prompt.
The new drives are durable, shock-tolerant and reliable over the long term. You get a three-year warranty as proof.
I tested a bright-red 4TB My Passport and was impressed how light and easy to carry it was. The USB 3.0 interface port also supports USB 2.0 connections. A power/activity LED near the port flashes when the drive’s being read or written to, and the flashing slows when the system is on standby.
The drive is formatted as a single NTFS partition for compatibility with all updated Windows operating systems. (If you use a Mac computer, buy the Mac version of the drive.)
When you connect the drive to your computer, there’s a prompt to install WD Backup, WD Security and WD Drive Utilities.
Backup copies and saves files from designated folders according to your schedule. WD Security locks the drive with password. Drive Utilities can check the drive’s health, erase its content, register the drive with the WD server and turn off the LED.
I plugged in a Lenovo Yoga 910 and copied a 2TB folder via a USB 3.0 connection. It took about 20 seconds.
The starting price for a Western Digital My Passport drive is Bt2,390.
Key Specs
- Capacity: |4TB, 3TB, 2TB, 1TB
- Interface: USB 3.0, USB 2.0-compatible
- Special features: Auto backup with included |WD Backup software, |password protection with hardware encryption
- Warranty: Three years
- Dimensions: 81.5x110x16.3mm |(1TB model), 21.5mm (2TB, 3TB, 4TB)
