Western Digital Celebrates 20 Years of My Passport with a Special Edition

[btarunr]

Since its introduction in 2004, millions around the world have trusted WD My Passport drives to store and back up their lives' most precious memories and valuable data. To commemorate this milestone anniversary of its most popular drive, Western Digital Corp. is launching the WD My Passport Ultra, 20th Emerald Anniversary Edition. Over the lifetime of the My Passport drives, Western Digital has provided approximately 180 exabytes of data storage for users worldwide, equivalent to up to 18 billion hours of HD video, up to 46 trillion photos, or up to 35 trillion songs.

Prior to the initial introduction of the WD My Passport drive, users had limited options when it came to taking important files with them on the go, having to sacrifice a power outlet and downtime to add and transfer data. In 2004, My Passport delivered a streamlined solution: portable products that offered an impressive amount of storage for many types of digital files - including videos, music, photos, and documents. What started as a simple solution with 40 GB capacity has increased by up to 150 times to now having the world's highest capacity 2.5" portable hard drive with 6 TB of storage, meeting the needs of the modern digital consumer.



"With 20 years, dozens of industrial designs, and approximately 130 million My Passport drives sold, Western Digital is proud to honor this important milestone for one of our most popular product lines, and more importantly, to celebrate the significance of its innovation and how it has positively impacted the lives of consumers around the globe," said Ravi Pendekanti, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at Western Digital. "We are carrying forward the legacy of reliable performance with the addition of the My Passport Ultra, 20th Emerald Anniversary Edition and look forward to continuing to help people keep backing up the content that matters most in their lives for decades to come."

Featuring a beautiful emerald color finish that traditionally signifies loyalty, peace, and security, the 20th Emerald Anniversary Edition drive continues the trusted legacy of reliability and durability, helping keep special moments safe. Key features include:

• Sleek Design - Enclosed with anodized metal in a commemorative bold emerald finish, the My Passport Ultra portable hard drive offers added durability and protection to take content on the go with confidence.
• Seamless Compatibility - Ready to use out of the box and universally compatible with Windows PC, Mac, mobile phones, tablets, and other USB-C devices.
• Expansive Capacity - Vast storage possibilities with up to 6 TB capacity, providing plenty of space to store photos, videos, music, important documents and more.
• Enhanced Software - Smarter backups with included Acronis True Image for Western Digital device management software that also helps defend against ransomware.
• Password Protection - Password protection and 256-bit AES hardware encryption to help safeguard important files.

Featuring a three-year limited warranty, the 2 TB (U.S. MSRP $89.99) and the 6 TB (U.S. MSRP $199.99) My Passport Ultra, 20th Emerald Anniversary Edition drives are available now for purchase at the Western Digital Store and authorized Western Digital retailers, e-tailers, and distributors.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[CrAsHnBuRnXp]

6TB for $200? Sounds like a good deal to me.

 

[A Computer Guy]

Oof I just bought a My Book 8TB. I would have liked to gotten this 6TB instead. Honestly I wouldn't mind a double height 2.5in portable HDD for higher capacity or something like a My Passport Duo in 2.5in form factor.

 

[AGlezB]

I'm looking at Amazon prices for 5-6TB WD My Passport/Elements.

All I can see is "Ultra" adds $20 to the price (see this for the differences) and going from 5tb to 6tb adds $55 to the price.
At $200 for 6tb you're better off buying two 5tb drives.

 

[Zareek]

I'm looking at Amazon prices for 5-6TB WD My Passport/Elements.

View attachment 367950
All I can see is "Ultra" adds $20 to the price (see this for the differences) and going from 5tb to 6tb adds $55 to the price.
At $200 for 6tb you're better off buying two 5tb drives.

The 2TB is even more silly. You can get a cheapo 2TB M.2 drive for literally a few bucks more. Or even better, spend $20 more and get something like a Kingston NV2. Sure, different storage segment, but I just don't see the value. WD used to be able to charge more because they made better drives for the most part. Since their SMR NAS drive shenanigans, can you really trust them?

 

[Chrispy_]

"Celebrates"?

As someone who has supported well over 3000 staff since the "My Passport" line was realeased by WD, I don't think I've ever encountered a more failure-prone model of external drive. I think I've probably sent 25+ WD Passport drives to data recovery labs at this point and on multiple occasions I've been amazed at how young the drives that failed were. I've also shucked many an external drive myself and the amount of shingles (SAMR) I've caught, or the audacity of finding the first non-SATA drives that have the SATA-to-usb adapter integrated into the HDD's PCB, so you can't even attempt software recovery on an unresponsive drive.... it's truly an /SMH moment.

Did they sell in large volumes? Sure. Cheap shit always outsells higher-quality product. I guess if they're celebrating the sales success at offloading reject drives on consumers for 20 years, then they certainly are justfied in doing that. IME the drives that failed the most in the last decade were the WD "white" drives that didn't make the cut to even be sold as a WD Green drive.

I will sing praises of WD's SSDs all day long but their mechanical hard drive lineage is statistically abysmal from my (relatively huge) sample size.

 

[AGlezB]

I will sing praises of WD's SSDs all day long but their mechanical hard drive lineage is statistically abysmal from my (relatively huge) sample size.

You're singing praises to SanDisk, not WD.

 

[Chrispy_]

You're singing praises to SanDisk, not WD.

They're the same thing, as of 2016.

 

[AGlezB]

They're the same thing, as of 2016.

They released quite a few SSD products under WD branding but AFAIK those where just rebranded SanDisk tech.

Also:

Western Digital Spins off all Flash Products to the SanDisk Brand

Western Digital made a significant change to the way it sells its products, which sees the SanDisk brand return to prominence. The company spun out SanDisk.com as a separate website, with product information, support, and in select regions, online retail, of all its NAND flash-based products...

www.techpowerup.com

EDIT:

I like how Tom's Hardware put it:

Western Digital gets hard drives, SanDisk gets flash.

Except it was always that way regardless of the WD label on some SSDs.

 

[Wirko]

I have a 500 GB My Passport from 2009 and it's still one of my backup drives. 3000 power-on hours, and CDI says "caution" because current pending sector count has climbed to 2, which means that maybe it won't last forever.

 

[phil6891]

A new NAS series wouldn't go a miss WD. Something to replace your aging 2016 line up.

 

[A Computer Guy]

"Celebrates"?

As someone who has supported well over 3000 staff since the "My Passport" line was realeased by WD, I don't think I've ever encountered a more failure-prone model of external drive. I think I've probably sent 25+ WD Passport drives to data recovery labs at this point and on multiple occasions I've been amazed at how young the drives that failed were. I've also shucked many an external drive myself and the amount of shingles (SAMR) I've caught, or the audacity of finding the first non-SATA drives that have the SATA-to-usb adapter integrated into the HDD's PCB, so you can't even attempt software recovery on an unresponsive drive.... it's truly an /SMH moment.

Did they sell in large volumes? Sure. Cheap shit always outsells higher-quality product. I guess if they're celebrating the sales success at offloading reject drives on consumers for 20 years, then they certainly are justfied in doing that. IME the drives that failed the most in the last decade were the WD "white" drives that didn't make the cut to even be sold as a WD Green drive.

I will sing praises of WD's SSDs all day long but their mechanical hard drive lineage is statistically abysmal from my (relatively huge) sample size.

What kind of failures occurred and how old were the drives? I've been using 2 x 4TB My Passport drives for backups for about 5 years now without much issue. I'm about forced to upgrade them to larger 8TB drives soon and was curious if those passport drives were standard 2.5in ones internally or those like you describe with the USB integrated into the PCB?

 

[Chrispy_]

What kind of failures occurred and how old were the drives? I've been using 2 x 4TB My Passport drives for backups for about 5 years now without much issue. I'm about forced to upgrade them to larger 8TB drives soon and was curious if those passport drives were standard 2.5in ones internally or those like you describe with the USB integrated into the PCB?

Usually ticking/clicking drives that spin up but don't register as a drive, so head-crash/unreadable sector issues.

I suspect most of the 2.5" models were damaged by being dropped or knocked, despite the protestations of their owners - but a good majority of the 3.5" models I investigated were storage that lived on a desk 24/7 and wouldn't have been subjected to any knocks or impacts. I can't speak definitively, but my guess/suspicion is that WD White drives used in consumer external hard drive enclosures were rough-running drives with imbalanced platters or rough bearings that were rejected internally at WD for sale as retail drive with a 3+ year warranty but still technically worked long enough to sell with a 1 or 2-year warranty as an external drive. Many of the drives I referred to recovery labs were WD Whites.

It's been a good decade since I last bothered but in the 1-2TB era, I shucked plenty of WD My Passport drives and received the usual lottery results of mostly WD Green, with the occasional Blue or Red, but I stopped shucking drives once I realised WD were just dumping Whites in their 3.5" external drives. Once SAMR hit the market, almost all external drives came infected with shingles.

 

[efikkan]

With all these gimmicky features and software, how about creating a solid product with SMART support and reporting to the OS when sectors are bad?
I have a number of these, and they'll happily serve totally corrupted data without any indication of error. (thankfully these were only backups, so I haven't lost anything)

I've started to move away from these external drives, although they are cheap, they are super unreliable. I finally managed to find one external case which supports SMART, and I stuck a WD Gold in there.

I don't think I've ever encountered a more failure-prone model of external drive. I think I've probably sent 25+ WD Passport drives to data recovery labs at this point and on multiple occasions I've been amazed at how young the drives that failed were.

I think one of mine failed when it was less than 2 years old, but I didn't RMA it since I couldn't wipe it. After I got a new computer I accidentally connected the wrong one and apparently it works sometimes, but only on one computer. Absolutely quality stuff!
I think only one of mine hasn't failed (yet) in one way or another, or rather I don't know because I cant find it...

IME the drives that failed the most in the last decade were the WD "white" drives that didn't make the cut to even be sold as a WD Green drive.

It makes me cringe whenever I see videos about building file servers/NAS with shucked WD white drives…
WD Gold only costs a few percent more, plus you can RMA those and you probably will struggle with returning shucked ones.

I will sing praises of WD's SSDs all day long but their mechanical hard drive lineage is statistically abysmal from my (relatively huge) sample size.

Their Gold and Ultrastar series are the most reliable HDDs on the market, and the Black series aren't bad either, too bad they basically abandoned that one.

The 2TB is even more silly. You can get a cheapo 2TB M.2 drive for literally a few bucks more.

There's an old saying using the right tool for the job…
Quality HDDs are much more suited for long-term storage and far less prone to data rot than flash, and flash needs to be powered on regularly to prevent data loss. Most HDDs will work 10+ years.
I wouldn't even touch cheap low quality SSDs, you're just asking for data loss then.

But regardless of how you backup your data, I suggest having a way to create checksums of files. There is not much use in having multiple copies if you can't know for sure which files are intact.

 

[AGlezB]

But regardless of how you backup your data, I suggest having a way to create checksums of files. There is not much use in having multiple copies if you can't know for sure which files are intact.

That is a point a lot of people miss nowadays, probably because both filesystems and backup software/platforms have improved a lot over the years.

 

[Zareek]

There's an old saying using the right tool for the job…
Quality HDDs are much more suited for long-term storage and far less prone to data rot than flash, and flash needs to be powered on regularly to prevent data loss. Most HDDs will work 10+ years.
I wouldn't even touch cheap low quality SSDs, you're just asking for data loss then.

But regardless of how you backup your data, I suggest having a way to create checksums of files. There is not much use in having multiple copies if you can't know for sure which files are intact.

That's literally why I said: "Sure, different storage segment, but I just don't see the value." Tom me, HDDs are really only useful for long term backup storage now. I even run my backups from SSD to SSD. Then I copy it out to my NAS and that gets backed up to a standalone HDD. Really important files are also encrypted and copied to online storage.

 

[Chrispy_]

WD Gold are good quality drives, IIRC they're just the same line as the equivalent Black but with a longer warranty.
Ultrastar are still just Hitachi in all but name; Different tech, different factory, different people.

I stopped buying WD drives when then put SAMR on their WD Reds. That was the dumbest f*cking thing I'd ever seen, not making that mistake again. All of the non-enterprise-class stuff I've bought since that incident have been Ironwolf Pro with the 5 year warranty and free data recovery in case of failure. I have no idea how good the data recovery part of that is, because they go into arrays and I never need to recover the data, it's already been rebuilt on one of the hot spares.

 

[efikkan]

WD Gold are good quality drives, IIRC they're just the same line as the equivalent Black but with a longer warranty.
Ultrastar are still just Hitachi in all but name; Different tech, different factory, different people.

Perhaps WD Gold were a derivative of WD Black back in the days, but after they brought the naming back some years ago they have been rebranded Ultrastar HC500 series (CMR drives) without the SAS support and some other enterprisy stuff. (Not to be confused with the Ultrastar HC600 series, which are SMR drives.)

I stopped buying WD drives when then put SAMR on their WD Reds.

The WD Red/Red Pro have a terrible reputation, but I do wonder if "user errror" is a contributing factor or if they are just utter crap. What I mean is, these are typically used in "cheap" NAS boxes, many of which have little or no active cooling of the HDDs, which is very critical for 24-7 operation of HDDs.

But regardless, the pricing differences are so small, I really see no good reason to use anything but the best drives. WD Gold/Ultrastar have been achieved the lowest failure rates, with Seagate's and Toshiba's enterprise drives closely behind, yet still very good reliability. In my region WD Gold may sometimes even be cheaper than WD Red.

 

[DaemonForce]

6TB/$180? Yeah I'll avoid that too. WD can continue celebrating their scummy practices in the corner, far tf away from my infra.
If I need an external HDD for whatever reason, I'll pack my antique Zen Vision.

You're singing praises to SanDisk, not WD.

Seems legit. A SanDisk USB is good enough to run my storage server without complaint.
Can't say that I trust much of WD's stuff given their awful history of causing grief for many, including myself.

 

[Chrispy_]

The WD Red/Red Pro have a terrible reputation, but I do wonder if "user errror" is a contributing factor or if they are just utter crap. What I mean is, these are typically used in "cheap" NAS boxes, many of which have little or no active cooling of the HDDs, which is very critical for 24-7 operation of HDDs.

I wouldn't dismiss the cooling abilities of cheap consumer NAS products. I have a wealth of experience in everything from the cheapest QNAP/Synology $200 ARM-powered plastic box, all the way up to large enterprise SAN solutions linking multiple shelves across multiple datacentres, and honestly the Synology DS220J I used was the worst-cooled NAS I've laid hands on and it was totally adequate - probably better than some of the name-brand rackmount stuff costing 5 or 6 figures.

Consumer stuff has to be consumer-proof for the warranty period and consumers are complete idiots.

When HPE, Pure, NetApp, or Dell provide you a storage solution, they know it's going in a climate-controlled server room or datacenter and design it to be just enough for that environment. When Synology/QNAP/ASUS design a NAS for your average buyer, they have to make sure it won't cook the disks when it's sucking in cat/dog hair, wedged between a wall that blocks the ventilation on one side and a set of drawers that block the ventilation on the other, and has random household detritus dropped on it from time to time....