Who would’ve known that storage space can still go higher as the platter size goes smaller? Western Digital does as they managed to cram a 2TB drive on a portable package that just works without any additional power required.
The My Passport Ultra is their ultra-compact line of external drive and is their most portable so far with a 2TB capacity. Their My Passport Slim is the slimmest but still tops at 1TB at the moment. Other 2TB portable drives they have are the WD Elements and the regular My Passport. The My Passport Ultra is the one loaded with most features though.
This drive comes in Blue, Red, Silver, and Black and we have the Black one. Included in the package is the USB cable and a carrying pouch. How thoughtful.
It’s a simple, and compact looking drive aside from the cubed pattern texture/design on its body. The only port you have and need is the USB 3.0 port. You can also connect this drive to a USB 2.0 port with no problem although use USB 3.0 for better results.
Although it’s listed at 2TB, the usable space is actually 1.81TB so don’t be alarmed where that almost 200GB went.
For its performance, I tried copying an 8GB file, and almost 4,000 small files to it using DiskBench to test the speed. I did this on both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports so you would know the difference.
| 1x 8GB file | USB 2.0 | USB 3.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Transfer Rate | 24.576 MB/s | 98.701 MB/s |
| Time | 5.28 minutes | 1.31 minutes |
| 3908 small files | USB 2.0 | USB 3.0 |
|---|---|---|
| Transfer Rate | 5.304 MB/s | 44.007 MB/s |
| Time | 1.18 minutes | 8.5 seconds |
The 97 MB/s transfer rate is quite impressive and I noticed that it even reaches up to 120 MB/s when doing simple file transfer in Windows 8. I’m still amazed at the speed you can get from a USB 3.0 transfer and with a 2TB storage, you’ll be enjoying it even more.
This drive also comes with the WD Smartware Pro which does automatic or scheduled backups from your PC to your external drive or to the cloud via your Dropbox account. It also comes with a security utility app allowing you to password protect and hardware encrypt your drive.
The 2TB WD My Passport Ultra retails for Php7,290 and comes with a 3-year limited warranty. If you want it in a smaller capacity, the 500GB goes for Php3,390 and the 1TB is at Php4,290.
