A Closer Look

The 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra (2015) portable hard disk drive supports USB 3.0 right out of the box. Hence, it uses the Micro-B USB 3.0 connector, which is a combination of a standard Micro-B USB 2.0 connector and a Micro-A USB 3.0 connector. This connector allows you to insert and use a Micro-B USB 2.0 cable in a pinch (if you lose the original USB 3.0 cable).

This new wider connector also allows for a more positive lock. This is useful for careless users who like to lift external drives by their cables - it makes it harder for the cable to dislodge and drop the drive, usually killing it in the process. However, this doesn't mean you should continue to do that with this drive!

Although the 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra (2015) supports USB 2.0, using it with a USB 2.0 port will cripple its performance as USB 2.0 has a maximum theoretical throughput of 480 Mbits/s, or about 33 MB/s in real life. USB 3.0, on the other hand, offers a maximum theoretical throughput of 5.0 Gbits/s, which translates into a real-world throughput of about 400 MB/s - roughly 12x faster than USB 2.0.

As all current computers have USB 3.0 ports, you should always connect this drive to a USB 3.0 port. Do note that USB 3.0 devices consume more power than USB 2.0 devices, so if you intend to connect more than one drive to a USB 3.0 hub, make sure it is a powered hub, or any connected drives will drop offline or stop functioning.

Right next to the USB port is a power/activity LED light. When the drive is idle, it will remain lit. This changes to a slow flash - once every 2.5 seconds when the drive goes into standby mode. When the drive is actively reading or writing though, the LED light will flash approximately 3 times per second. So if you have a habit of directly unplugging your portable hard disk drives without first disconnecting them from Windows, make sure the LED light is either steadily lit or pulsing slowly. Do not disconnect the drive while the LED light is flashing rapidly.

The 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra (2015) has a smooth plastic top case with a rough plastic base. With the exception of the glossy My Passport Ultra label on the top case, the entire drive is resistant to fingerprints, which is great. The base has four rubber feet to help keep it in place, even on a slightly sloping surface.

Hardware Encryption

The 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra (2015) portable hard disk drive supports full disk hardware encryption based on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) using the 256-bit key length. That is the strongest AES cipher available, which ensures that your data will remain safe even someone steals the drive and attempts to break into it. In addition, the encryption and decryption is done directly on the drive itself, which means your computer's performance does not suffer as a result. In software implementations, your computer's processor would be used to perform those encryption and decryption calculations.

However, this feature is not enabled by default. To use it, you have to install the included WD Security software, which allows you to set the password (up to 25 characters) to encrypt the drive. Thereafter, you can unlock the drive using the same WD Security software. If you intend to use it with a computer that does not have either software installed, plugging in the My Passport Ultra will launch a virtual CD containing the WD Drive Unlock utility, which you can use to unlock the drive.

For more information on WD's hardware encryption, please see our article, 8 Facts You Never Knew About Western Digital's Hardware Encryption.

Usable Capacity

This 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra drive has an official formatted capacity of 2 TB. We checked that out by formatting it in NTFS using Windows 7.

The actual formatted capacity was 2,000,362,139,648 bytes. This is slightly (362 MB) more than the official formatted capacity. With about 155 MB allocated to the NTFS file system, the actual usable capacity was slightly above 2 TB.

The My Passport Ultra drive actually comes with a suite of backup and encryption software (for Windows and Mac) stored inside. The software takes up about 189 MB of space. Even if you don't use it, it would be a good idea to store a copy elsewhere, just in case you decide otherwise later.

Testing The My Passport Ultra

The Testbed

Testing Methodology

We tested in Microsoft Windows 7 with the latest updates. We chose to use IO Meter 2008 as well as our own suite of test files. Here are the details of the two sets of test files we used :

• Large Files : 5 high-resolution videos (2,002,511,061 bytes)
• Small Files : 2,527 mix of low, medium and high-resolution photos (2,000,704,583 bytes)

All transfer rate tests were timed using a Seiko WC73-4000 stopwatch with a rated accuracy of 10 ms. A minimum of 3 test runs were performed, with additional test runs undertaken if the results were off by more than half a second. The closest group of 3 run times was averaged to obtain the final result.

The case temperature results were obtained using a Fluke 59 Max+ infra-red thermometer. The Load temperature test was carried out after at least 5 minutes running IO Meter (512 KB sequential read), with IO Meter continuing to run. The drives were allowed to idle for a minimum of 15 minutes before the Idle temperature test was performed. A minimum of 5 test spots were examined on each case, with the maximum test result used.

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