Western Digital yesterday refreshed its popular portable and desktop hard drive range with a more colorful line-up and increased capacities.
As part of a "reimagined" design that WD says better reflects how data is now "much more of a personal commodity", the company's portable USB 2.0/3.0 My Passport drives are available in six vivid colors – Black, Yellow, Red, White, Orange and Blue. The Black color is available pre-formatted for Mac systems, while all the others need reformatting to HFS + Journaled Mac to work with Apple hardware.
The My Passport drives can be had in 1TB ($79.99), 2TB ($94.99), 3TB ($129.99), and 4TB ($139.99) storage capacities.
Meanwhile, the company's redesigned My Book USB 3.0 desktop storage solution will soon be available in 3TB ($129.99), 4TB ($129.99?), 6TB ($199.99), and 8TB ($249.99) capacities, and is compatible with Mac and Windows systems out of the box.
All the WD drives come with an Auto backup schedule feature as part of the Time Machine-compatible WD Backup software, as well as password protection, 256-bit AES hardware encryption tools, and a two-year warranty.
In conjunction with the new HD drives, for the first time Western Digital also announced a range of internal SSD drives for desktop and laptop PC computers.
Top Rated Comments
Plus WD's reliability has never been great for me. That's only in my experience though. YMMV.
- Pre-built external drives: who cares
- 5400 RPM hard drives: stay away
- 2TB laptop self-contained hybrid drives: WHERE?
- 2TB laptop 7200 RPM hard drives: WHERE?
- Laptop 7200 RPM self-contained hybrid drives: WHERE?
- 3TB laptop (hybrid) hard drives: WHERE?
So if the port breaks or the controller, all your data is lost forever.
Or something called redundant backups. Having only one backup of one's most critical data is foolish. A second backup off-site is even preferable - your home at work if secure and work at home if allowable.
I've never had a single copy of my Photos or iTunes Library, and I sure as hell don't want hundreds of GBs of my personal data on a server in Nevada. Should my Mac croak, I want to be back to working in a reasonable amount of time.