WD (Old Model) My Passport Ultra 1 TB Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive with Auto Backup, Black

Nice external drive and it's fast. The days of unreliable WD drives seem to be behind them. These are light, robust, fast and cost effective. Self-powering, there's not double cable non-sense with these. I've ordered several for clients. My only complaint is that they sometimes include a flimsy cloth case and sometimes come with no case, when in fact they should always include the premium case that normally sells for $10 extra.

Petit, transportable facilement, a fait mon bonheur à l'époque ou je l'ai acheté

👌 okay

I did a careful product analysis before I purchased this product. Looking for additional highly portable storage I had originally looked at installing a hard drive in my laptop optical bay using a spare 500GB 5400RPM HDD I had laying around. Unfortunately another laptop had a hard drive failure and it became necessary to use that spare drive as a replacement for the failed drive. At that point I was no longer sure how to proceed. The last time I shopped for external storage was 5 years ago. I bought a WD My Book at the time. 2 years later the enclosure took a nosedive but the drive was still good, needless to say that drive got transplanted into a new enclosure and is still running fine today, problem being it is pretty large (3.5" form factor), has its own power supply, and not very portable. So going into this process I was looking for something powered only by a USB connection, and preferably smaller than a thick trade paperback. Well, I was in for a bit of a surprise. The new portable drives were about as big as my iphone and all were powered by USB connection. Big plus for me. At that point it became a maximum dollar to storage to quality equation, with a optical bay HDD still being an option. Since I could do that for $65 or so and use an older 250GB HDD I had laying around that became a base line for my budget, however I wanted at least 500GB since I am busy backing up my media library, and wanted it handy for travel. Essentially the more storage the better. Speed was not so much of a factor, raw storage was, and since I run a machine with Ubuntu 12.04 the various manufacturer provided apps and encryption software for Windows or Mac were a complete non factor. So basically the biggest bang for my dollar is what I was looking at. Upon further research I discovered the best storage range was definitely items in the 1TB range. Not only were they the same size as 500GB solutions, they only cost roughly $10 more. 2TB solutions were thicker, and the price jump was much larger. 1TB it was. I narrowed it down to three choices. The Seagate Backup Plus, the HGST Touro Mobile, and the WD My Passport Ultra all priced at roughly $70. So why the Ultra? It fit all my requirements, had a smaller form factor, lighter weight, equal storage, similar price, best benchmarks, and I have had great luck with WD HDD's in the past. It arrived yesterday, took one minute to set up and less than half an hour to get all my data transferred. It is very quiet, and gives off very little heat. Pretty sturdy construction. I will definitely update this if any problems occur, but for now I got exactly what I was looking for, quickly, and at a great price.

I've used a single 1 TB Passport Ultra with SmartWare backup utility since late 2013 for both my desktop and laptop Windows 7 PCs. After some initial SmartWare glitches it's worked so well I'm getting another - the first 1 TB Passport Ultra is full now. Regarding SmartWare, some 2013 criticisms were valid then but are out of date now. And other criticisms misinterpret the purpose of SmartWare. WD continues to update SmartWare and the bugs in the 2013 version have been resolved. I use file/folder backup rather than category backup, which resolved the glitches I experienced back in 2013. The main misunderstanding is about the purpose of SmartWare - which confused me at first. It's not two-way syncing, like some cloud storage (Google+ Drive is an example). SmartWare is designed to be a goof-proof backup. Anything backed up via SmartWare cannot be deleted from the backup drive. And you can delete files from your main drive without fear of also losing the backup (not so with Google+ Drive in full sync mode). SmartWare isn't two-way syncing, isn't network attached storage and isn't merely rewritable external storage. It's true backup, designed primarily to protect data. The downside is that it's inflexible. If SmartWare fills up the backup drive with junk files, duplicates, etc., the only way to recover drive space is to start over. That's what I'm doing with my original Passport Ultra, by transferring data to another external drive, getting a second Passport Ultra, and recycling the first PU for a new round of backups. Also, if you have Windows 7 or later, you're not locked into SmartWare. You can use the free Windows Backup included with the OS. It works fine, is very simple, and compacts files and folder structures into zip files in a familiar hierarchy. Or you can use Acronis - Western Digital provides a free version of Acronis for download. Or you can simply drag and drop files and bypass any backup utilities altogether. Just depends on your data needs. I'm a photographer and need true backup because it's more secure and runs well in the background or as scheduled. I also bought a 3 TB My Cloud a couple of weeks ago for pseudo-NAS, and for the Red drive reliability. I'm considering a 4 TB My Book with the Green drives, but prefer the compact size and USB powered Passport Ultra. However SmartWare is painfully slow on My Cloud (transfer speed is about 1 GB per hour or slower). But it's fine on the Passport Ultra, even via USB 2.