WD 2TB My Passport Ultra, Blue, Portable External Hard Drive, backup software with defense against ransomware, and password protection, USB-C and USB 3.1 - WDBC3C0020BBL-WESN

I have 6 brands of backup external hard drives. I've had nothing but problems with the ruggedized Transcends; and every Seagate I have is frustratingly slow and not always recognized on any given drive. But the Western Digital My Passport Ultras -- I've had them in constant use for 3 years, and they have not failed me yet. Last month, I ordered 2 more of the newest model. I could say they work great (because they do), but what I really should say is that they work great and are rippingly fast. This last archive took 1/2 the time it does on the older Passport drives, and 1/5 the time it takes on the Seagates. It's not just the USB 3, either. The old-gen Passports are also USB 3.0. Also, I have USB 3 on several backup media, and their transfer speed is consistent. These new-gen Passports are just really fast. To drop from 15 hours to 3 compared to other brands? Or from 5+ hrs to 3 on the new gens? Either way, i's an impressive improvement, and frees up the system (and me) for more work. It makes backup a chore, but not a full business day loss. The Passport drives also have built-in security if you want to use it, from password protection to encryption. I feel more comfortable with my data on these drives than on my primary system. I almost hate to say it, because it might jinx me in a world where a 25% fail rate seems to be acceptable to Asus, Acer, Dell, HP, and the rest of them, but... WD has earned my customer loyalty. This is a very good, reliable product that holds my data without failure and works for years. Also -- and not to be underestimated -- the WD privacy policy actually allows you to opt out of just about all typical data mining for ads, marketing, and "tailoring" of the internet to your click stream. This is a company that actually seems to work for the customer, not just put out a good product. Considering that much of our lives/livelihoods are now captured in digital, a reliable backup and/or archive drive is critical. These are the best external HDs I've used over the years. All in all, I am very pleased. When I need new media again, I'll be looking at WD's My Passports first.

A fast, compact drive powered by its USB-C connector. A solidly built cable is included plus a USB-A converter. There's a single activity LED near the connector. Write performance on a USB-C 3.1 host interface was decent, with 1MB sequential writes running at 112MiB/s, but dropping to 94MiB/s presumably along the slower (outer) parts of the spinning disk. Linux/BSD people, here's how the drive showed up for me: WD My Passport 260D 2007 Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device 1907697MB (3906963456 512 byte sectors) Note the enclosure shows up as a separate device, BSD sees it as: ses1: WD SES Device 2007 Fixed Enclosure Services SPC-4 SCSI device ses1: SES Device USB-C is a selling point for me despite some skeptical reviewers here. It isn't meant to be faster, necessarily, that's a function of the interfaces on each end. But it's always a more robust & simpler connector. It lasts long than microUSB (by design) and doesn't need to be flipped back and forth repeatedly until it finally fits. I generally won't buy a device with an older USB connector unless there's no option. USB-C all the way. A great little drive, and nice-looking too. I might wish it were SSD or that the LED was on the front, but otherwise no complaints.

Good inexpensive portable storage. I like that they don’t require separate power. Have bought seven WD Passport external hard drives in the past year. Two of them are these silver 4Tb drives. Overall happy with them. One star off because they are a little slow when copying files, and seem to never power down / sleep if they are mounted but not in use. (On a MAC, freshly formatted ExFat, Spotlight-excluded). To avoid them getting too warm, I unmount the drive when I want them to stop churning. (Note: I accidentally unplugged one of my Passport drives while it was not in use, but still mounted, and it required an overnight disk repair with Disk Utilities app to recover it.)

The drive is a niece piece of work. Something to bare in mind about the transfer speeds, the drive is a HDD (Hard Disk Drive) which means data read/write speeds are capped at about 180 MB's (Megabytes) per second. Where as the cable can do about 600 MB's (again Megabytes) per second. The company that produces, on average, produces very solid pieces of hardware -- but with that you're going to pay for the price. The nice thing about this is that it compares to the leading competitors in terms of reliability, endurance, and cost. I've seen a few complain about the "metal" case. My educated guess is that it's a form of Aluminum casing as any other metal would make it much heavier, and the idea behind portable is that it's not overly heavy for it's size.

I have several external hard drives , all my passport and they all are easy to work with. This hard drive is fast and holds all my photos and they are beautiful.

I use multiple Western Digital hard drives in my home assembled PCs, video surveillance recorder, and NAS for storage of over-the-air recorded TV for PLEX playback. I also use the company's Sandisk solid state portable storage to put back up copies of documents in the bank's safe deposit box and for large transfers to family members. When I caused an error that required me to send out one of my hard drives for data recovery, I needed to provide a sufficient size portable drive for the transfer / restoration. My choice to use this Ultra was simple, especially since it now uses the USB-C connection versus the prior odd-shaped connector used on many prior portable drives. Although this currently serves as a back up storage drive, it performed well when I transferred my restored data to the PC drives that I up-sized. The transfer was reasonably fast and the case did a good job of dissipating the heat over the hours it took for 3TB.

I had a previous version of this WD My Passport Ultra that started having glitches after about 4 years, but it had worked well until then so I bought this newer version. It arrives with a "Quick Start" guide that simply showed a drawing of plugging the enclosed cord into both the computer and the WD hard drive, which I did, to my Dell laptop with Windows 10. The hard drive had an intermittently flashing blue light but absolutely nothing else happened- no Start-up software whatsoever. I went to the Tech Support site and started troubleshooting. I spent hours trying the various suggestions: plug it into a different USB port, reboot the computer; unplug the computer from the surge protector power strip and plug it into a wall socket; check under Disk Management to see if it recognizes the hard drive- it did- and finally ended up manually searching for and Downloading all the Apps and installing them one at a time (WD Discovery, Utilities, Security, and Diagnostics- all the things the hard drive should have done when I first plugged it in). The Diagnostic App seems to show that the hard drive is working, and I was able to manually Back up my data (though it had a long list of files it could not backup). I had a Techie relative help me review how it is now working, and it appears that maybe after all this effort, it may have backed up my data, but I don't have much confidence in it. I would not recommend this WD hard drive.

I have been using an older external disk from my older Macbook for backups on my newer Mac not knowing what I was missing on USB-C 3.1 backups. The old SATA to USB A to USB-C (12 inch Macbook dongle) deal was slow and this was pretty fast. Of course I could have bought a Sata to USB-C wire and that would have probably made my older drive zippier but this is so much simpler and I have always disliked the old connector. Probably good to have a newer external drive anyway. Of course the blue version of this drive needed to be formatted for Mac but it was worth if for the couple bucks saved and cooler color. I was wanting an SSD but it's apparently not needed or even recommended for backups. Some reviews claimed the USB-C cable wasn't good or that it didn't fit but that issue must have been fixed or I got lucky. Also if you're considering an SSD lots of stuff in the reviews and even speed tests. This older style disk is reliable and gets the job done and doesn't have any weird speed issues some of the SSDs seem to have.

Perfekt for Time Machine

Muito bom. Difícil encontrar um equivalente pelo preço. Leve esse.

Hab mir die Platte gekauft für ein Backup meiner NAS. Funktioniert tadellos. Einfach an das Qnap via USB Adapter angeschlossen und schon war die Platte einsatzbereit und konnte über Nacht 2TB Daten sichern. Perfekt. Und jetzt fühlt man sich sicher, falls doch mal was mit der NAS sein sollte ist noch das Backup da :)

I really like the design of this latest WD Ultra passport drive. It's much better than the standard passport drives and why shouldn't tech look good? The important thing is that the drive performs well. This does as it writes and reads fast over USB3 gen1 and seems to work on any powered USB port that I have tried and that's on Linux Mint, Windows 10 and Mac. The unit is half metallic and half plastic. I would have prefer for it to be all metallic but at least this is better than the normal passport drive. I would definitely recommend this if you need a good capacity portable drive.

Hards disk working was good , reading & writing of date was pretty fast . C cable gives it power for fast process.