Review: WD My Passport Ultra (3TB)

Western Digital are one of the biggest names in digital storage for a number of good reasons. Their storage solutions are fast, reliable and as far as hard drives go, they’re often quite stylish. It isn’t enough to simply offer a TARDIS of storage these days, you have to offer new features and conveniences too. Speaking of conveniences, the Western Digital My Passport Ultra comes with WD’s new Backup software, in addition up to a whopping 3TB of space. So how does it perform? Let’s take a look!

Features

Huge capacity in the palm of your hand – With 3 TB of storage, you can take your all your photos, videos and music with you wherever you go.
WD Backup – Scalable and automatic – Create an automatic backup strategy that fits your schedule and work style. Back up all the files on your system or only specific folders and files. You’re in control.
Local and cloud backup – You choose — back up to your My Passport Ultra drive or to your Dropbox™ cloud-service account.*A Dropbox account is required for cloud backup.
WD Security – Classified-level protection – You protect the contents of your phone with a password, right? Why not do the same for your My Passport? Select password protection to engage powerful 256-bit hardware-based encryption, which is used by governments to protect classified information.
Power up with USB 3.0 – My Passport Ultra features USB 3.0 compatibility, which means 5 Gb/s transfer speed (3X faster than USB 2.0) and you can power up your My Passport Ultra without carrying a bulky power cord and plug.
Sleek design with high capacity – At just half an inch thin (12.8mm) for the 500 GB model, this drive is sleek and fast with plenty of capacity for your important digital content.

Specifications

The Look
As seen in other WD external drives, they always ensure you get a practical and superior product and while the surround of the case is plastic, it doesn’t feel or look cheap. It’s sturdy and comes in a range of colours such as white, black, blue and white. Also available separately are WD Grip Packs which feature a colour grip piece which goes around the hard drive and a colour matching USB cord if you want to really mix things up!

WD Grip Pack (sold separately)

Like the previous WD units we have recently reviewed, the unit has the USB connection port, along with an indicator light to show that it’s being powered. No mess and no fuss. Plain and simple, yet ever so sleek and compact. The My Passport Ultra was built for durability as well as long term reliability, which is a given from a WD product.

The unit fits in the palm of your hand and could easily fit in a jacket pocket if needed on the go. It’s compact in product size, but not compact in data capacity

How it works
Being BUS powered, the WD My Passport Ultra is a plug and play product. Out of the box the Ultra is pre-formatted for Windows OS (NTFS). You can reformat if needed for a Mac or other operating system and it takes just a few moments to do so. Once connected you are good to start transferring files, data, music, movies – whatever you need. And best of all, it’s not rocket science!

Software
The My Passport Ultra comes preloaded with some handy software. These free added extras don’t need to be installed if you don’t want to use them, though they are quite impressive.

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The WD Backup software is available for Windows OS only and replaces the previously installed WD SmartWare which had been bundled with predecessor models of external drives from WD. It’s incredibly easy to install – just click on the install icon! Once installed, WD Backup allows you to pick whatever files on your laptop of PC’s hard drive you want to back up, creates a folder on the My Passport Ultra and after that it starts backing up every hour, every day or every month. The only downfall I found here was that I couldn’t change the frequency which is neither here nor there in my opinion. Also included as an extra is WD utilities which allows you to check on the drives functions and status or even format it, along with WD Security which assists in creating a password to secure the drive. With the use of 256-AES (Advance Encryption Standard), once you input your chosen password the drives content becomes inaccessible without it. All three programs were tested on a Windows 10 machine with no compatibility issues.

Performance
Like the other WD drives we have reviewed lately, the My Passport Ultra’s performance was to a high standard. I found it incredibly easy, stress free and fast to move a heap of random files (some small music files and a few couple of GB files) from my laptop over to the drive with minimal fuss and promptly. Using USB 3.0, the average copy speed on the Ultra is 110MPs and the read speed around 120MPs.

And with 3TB of space (well, 2.72TB if you include the pre-installed software) there is plenty of room for storing files and data, backing up your important info and accessing what you need on the go.

Summary
If you are looking for large capacity external drive with an added bonus of file protection with the use of the WD Backup or securing your data from prying eye via WD Security, then definitely check out the My Passport Ultra. It’s portable, compact, easy to use, and carries a peace of mind 3 year warranty should anything internal waver. With a reasonable price tag of $299, the My Passport Ultra should be a top contender if you are in the market for external storage.

WD My Passsport Ultra

10

Features

10/10

Accessability

10/10

Performance

10/10

Pros

• - HUGE storage capacity
• - Portable
• - Added bonus of preinstalled WD software
• - Affordable price tag

Cons

• - None!