Western Digital releases a limited edition My Passport Ultra
I'm happy to admit I'm a big fan of Western Digital My Passport drives, and I've covered many of them for Micro Mart over the past decade. I know it's been that long because the latest design is a volume limited 'Anniversary Edition' commemorating 10 Years of My Passport products. Physically the Ultra Anniversary Edition bears an uncanny likeness to the Ultra My Passport Metal Edition, and looking at the specifications I'm reasonably confident that they're of the same core construction.
This is a very striking design, which uses a highly finished aluminium skin to encase five sides the mostly plastic drive enclosure. The Anniversary Edition comes in just two sizes, either 1TB or 2TB, and a single colour. Design-wise I've seen its colour variously described as 'Champagne' and even 'Gold', but to be honest it looked silver to me.
The review model was the 2TB capacity option, the extra space making it notably fatter than its smaller brother. That's just 13.5mm thick, where the 2TB drive has swollen to 18.8mm, because it uses a larger drive mechanics.
Identifying the physical mechanism is pure guesswork but, looking at all Western Digital's 2.5" range, the company only make a 2TB models in their WD Green series and that drive is 15mm thick. That would strongly hint that this is a WD20NPVX mechanism, featuring 8MB of cache and four 500GB platters.
In CrystalDiskMark the drive managed a top read speed of 113MB/s and writing at almost exactly the same rate. While that's not impressive for a desktop drive or an SSD, for one placed on a 2.5" laptop mechanism it's excellent.
For those who like to get the most out of USB 3.0, the drive does support Turbo mode (not UASP), though it made no appreciable difference to the benchmark scores activating it. That's probably because this drive wouldn't go faster directly attached to SATA.
If this was the whole story I would not have considered requesting a page of space to review it, but Western Digital do offer extra enticements other than the hardware. One of these is the inclusion of WD Smartware, a general purpose software backup tool that's been getting progressively better with each release.
Smartware 2.4.4 is the latest release and now supports both live and timed backups. Once installed the software senses the Ultra Metal Edition (or Anniversary) and upgrades itself to Pro version for free. That enables you to backup to other drive makes than Western Digital, and even secures data to DropBox. My only big complaint about this tool is that it still doesn't offer a complete system snapshot for a bare-metal restore.
Another desirable extra, though, is that the Ultra Anniversary Edition has 256-bit hardware encryption baked in, making it ideal for those with business sensitive data and other secrets to keep. You can get 2TB of portable storage cheaper, but it won't look as slick or work as elegantly as this one does. Get one before they're gone. Mark Pickavance
Probably one of the best portable hard drives you can get.
Overview
• Bold, aluminium radial-spin design
• Automatic, local and cloud backup
• Password protection and 256-bit hardware encryption
• Premium storage with up to 2TB capacity
• USB 3.0 connectivity