Any links to online stores should be assumed to be affiliates. The company or PR agency provides all or most review samples. They have no control over my content, and I provide my honest opinion.

This is sponsored advertising content in association with Western Digital.

The Western Digital My Passport Ultra is an affordable, portable USB powered hard drive that offers storage up to a staggering 4 TB.

The model I’m reviewing is the standard model in Black, but there are lots of colours to choose from. There is also a metal additional which has a slight price premium, and by looking at the pictures, it does look a little smarter than this model.

The device itself is a little bit chubby, but this is due to the large capacity drive. Actual dimensions dependant on size vary from 110mm x 12.8mm x 81.6mm to 110.5mm x 15.4mm x 81.6mm.

The contents of the box are quite simple: you get your hard drive, a USB 3.0 cable as well as the usual install and warranty things.

Plus, you get a bunch of utilities thrown in on the drive. I generally don’t use these kinds of utilities, but I feel the ones WD provide are superior to others companies’ offerings.

WD SmartWare Pro seems to be a comprehensive backup solution that can do automatic backups to your drive as well as cloud backups.

One of the stand out features of the drive is hardware encryption, with WD Security. This allows you to set password protection and hardware encryption for your drive to help protect your files from unauthorized use or access.

There is also WD Drive Utilities where users can run diagnostics to determine any issues that may be happening with the drive. A sleep timer allows you to put the drive to sleep on schedule. Finally, a Drive Erase tool allows you to permanently delete everything on the drive, including removing any encryption/passwords.

This drive runs at 5400rpm, and the performance was pretty much the same as the Freecom, if not slightly better. I generally got 80-100MB/s with large single files such as ISOs going over the 100MB/s mark quite frequently.

Pricing of the My Passport Ultra is good too; you can pick up the 1TB drive for £50, 2TB for £70 and 4 TB for approx £150. There are some marginally cheaper options on Amazon, but to be honest, I would happily pay the extra few pounds for the reliability of a Western Digital combined with the hardware encryption, and decent backup software.

I partnered with the brand to write this article but every word is mine

 

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