Conclusion

With so many choices in the marketplace, external hard disk drives have become somewhat of a commodity, differentiated mainly by their storage capacity and price. When that happens - it becomes a race to the bottom. The emphasis shifts from making better products to making cheaper products. Performance and quality suffer as a result. That's why it's always nice to see any attempt to arrest, if not reverse, this downward spiral.

The 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra (WDBBKD0020) is an evolutionary upgrade of the venerable 2 TB Western Digital My Passport, which is already renown for its high speed and spacious storage capacity. You can think of it as a faster version of the 2 TB Western Digital My Passport with built-in hardware encryption.

While the 2015 My Passport Ultra may look very similar to the My Passport, they have different performance characteristics. Western Digital has obviously optimised the My Passport Ultra for large accesses - it was significantly faster than the My Passport in this respect, whether it was random or sequential. The downside - the My Passport is much faster when it comes to small sequential reads and writes.

Although sequential reads and writes are the two most important performance indicators for portable hard disk drives, the LARGE reads and writes are, by far, the most important of the two because most of the files we write today are 512 KB or larger. So Western Digital's emphasis on large accesses makes a lot of sense.

In practical terms, filling up the entire My Passport Ultra drive now take just over 5.5 hours, instead of 8 hours 48 minutes. That is a huge difference. The difference becomes really absurd when we compare it to commodity-grade portable hard disk drives that would take a good 19 hours to write 2 TB of data. This alone is reason enough to pay more for this drive, as opposed to the cheaper but much slower commodity-grade portable hard disk drive.

The downside to all that performance is the heat produced. The drive gets real toasty after a good run, so it would be wise to let it cool down before handling it.

It's not just all about performance though. Western Digital also provides the drive with two useful software - the WD Security utility and the WD Backup software. WD Security allows you to protect the drive using its built-in hardware encryption, while WD Backup can be used to backup your files to the cloud. Unfortunately, at this point in time, they only support Dropbox. We hope they will eventually support other cloud storage providers.

Right now, this drive commands a price premium because it is one of the fastest 2 TB portable drives in the market. However, we certainly think that their much better performance is well worth the price premium. To top it off, Western Digital is offering a 3-year warranty, which sure beats the 1-year warranty on commodity-grade drives.

For the lowest current prices on Western Digital My Passport Ultra portable USB 3.0 hard disk drives, click here!

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