WD Redesigns World's #1 Selling Portable Hard Drive

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WD®, a Western Digital company, and world leader in storage solutions, today introduced the new, redesigned My Passport® Ultra portable hard drives and My Passport for Mac drives. With the My Passport line now in its 7th generation, the My Passport Ultra and My Passport for Mac portable hard drives are now available in capacities up to 3 TB and in four stylish colors - Classic Black, Brilliant White, Wild Berry and Noble Blue. WD is also introducing a new optional accessory – WD Grip Pack – a soft band, available in a variety of colors, which encircles the drive, offering consumers an easy way to personalize their My Passport drives.
 
I always avoid the Passport drives as they usually have a custom SATA connector inside the case.

Makes them all but impossible to hook up to a SATA dock or similar if the caddys USB controller fails.
 
daglesj said:
I always avoid the Passport drives as they usually have a custom SATA connector inside the case.

Makes them all but impossible to hook up to a SATA dock or similar if the caddys USB controller fails.
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Well shit. You weren't kidding.

ECi6F4C.png


WD goes back on my shitlist. Wait. Now there's nobody left to buy from. ;(
 
techrat said:
Well shit. You weren't kidding.

http://i.imgur.com/ECi6F4C.png[img]

WD goes back on my shitlist. Wait. Now there's nobody left to buy from. ;([/QUOTE]

HGST Touro Mobile drives are still standard 2.5 drives in an enclosure AFAIK. OWC used to sell the empty enclosures. I bought one to run few USB 3.0 speed tests.
[url]http://eshop.macsales.com/item/HGST/0STOUROMOB3/[/url]
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Have a few for years and have not had the usb port fail so must be lucky. Don't love the concept of hardwired but these little WD drives have served superbly so I'll keep going back.
 
Buy at Costco - lifetime warranty - then you can just return/exchange it if the controller fails. Doesn't help you recover your data but...you have a backup, right? :)
 
techrat said:
Well shit. You weren't kidding.

ECi6F4C.png


WD goes back on my shitlist. Wait. Now there's nobody left to buy from. ;(
Click to expand...

does that mean the case is just a case and the USB 3.0 controller is on the hard drive?
 
PliotronX said:
It is not unique to WD. You can thank Backblaze for singlehandedly causing anti-shucking practices
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I have to admit I was buying 2x1TB Seagate NAS boxes back then for the drives which were cheaper than buying one 1TB HDD.

Not a good time really.
 
There is nothing bad about this, and I view it as a good thing.

It was kindof silly to buy a portable drive that is larger than needed, cause they had to add extra chips to convert ide/sata to a usb or other port.

Now that there is enough market, that it's cheap enough to make drives specifically for this purpose, with onboard usb connection, instead of an adapter, in the goal to make your portable harddrive more reliable and smaller, by not having as many not-needed parts and connections, you want to bash them?

This is a good move for them, and fits the usage I would use for portable drives. No I don't buy external drives, to remove the casing and install them into servers. I use them for laptops, and to take larger files with me between locations.
 
techrat said:
Well shit. You weren't kidding.

ECi6F4C.png


WD goes back on my shitlist. Wait. Now there's nobody left to buy from. ;(
Click to expand...

looks like a standard USB connector... isn't that something that can still be worked with? Shouldn't stop you from being able to buy at least some form of external enclosure.
 
GotNoRice said:
looks like a standard USB connector... isn't that something that can still be worked with? Shouldn't stop you from being able to buy at least some form of external enclosure.
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Zepher said:
does that mean the case is just a case and the USB 3.0 controller is on the hard drive?
Click to expand...

That is a USB3 connector built into the drive controller. There are no SATA connectors to plug into. That means when the SATA to USB bridge dies, the whole drive dies. No removing it from the case and plugging the bare drive into a SATA connector on a desktop to try to revive it or recover the data on it.
 
Why anyone would buy an external drive, remove it from its enclosure and void the drive's warranty, is beyond me. The price difference between external and internal drives these days isn't enough to pooch your warranty over, IMO.

Haven't touched a WD laptop drive in years. Samsung's Spinpoint M9T drives have been spectacularly reliable for me. In fact, I've never actually had a Samsung drive of any kind fail for me. I'm still running a number of five year old Samsung F3EG EcoGreen 3.5" drives in my file server.
 
The last one of these I looked at, Doesn't have a usb to sata bridge on it, just usb, no sata.

There is no need for sata on these disks, just come straight from the drives cpu to usb port, no need to talk sata at all.
 
patrickdk said:
Now that there is enough market, that it's cheap enough to make drives specifically for this purpose, with onboard usb connection, instead of an adapter, in the goal to make your portable harddrive more reliable and smaller, by not having as many not-needed parts and connections, you want to bash them?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't say more reliable. I would say 1 in 3 portable USB drives I get handed into me are WD Passports and I have to turn the owners away due to the crappy connectors.

"Oh it's a Passport? Sorry, no can do!"

I would never touch one. Bad drives.
 
patrickdk said:
The last one of these I looked at, Doesn't have a usb to sata bridge on it, just usb, no sata.

There is no need for sata on these disks, just come straight from the drives cpu to usb port, no need to talk sata at all.
Click to expand...

The SATA Controller, the one that actually does the talking to the drive, is built in. USB has no known interface for talking directly to hard drive controllers. That's why every drive case needs a USB to SATA bridge. USB isn't a magical, all encompassing interface that works with whatever drive you slap it on. You still need controllers for everything it connects to. Even flash drives have controllers before USB can be put on the board.

People have been able to connect these apparently USB only drives by soldering leads to different parts of the board that connect to a SATA header.
 
techrat said:
The SATA Controller, the one that actually does the talking to the drive, is built in. USB has no known interface for talking directly to hard drive controllers. That's why every drive case needs a USB to SATA bridge. USB isn't a magical, all encompassing interface that works with whatever drive you slap it on. You still need controllers for everything it connects to. Even flash drives have controllers before USB can be put on the board.

People have been able to connect these apparently USB only drives by soldering leads to different parts of the board that connect to a SATA header.
Click to expand...

Drives need controller chips regardless of the interface. Even SATA is interpreted by a controller on the drive. It's completely possible to design a controller that has a USB interface natively and does not use SATA whatsoever.

That said, I don't know if any drives on the market right now work that way. But it is absolutely possible.

USB flash drives / "thumb drives" don't use SATA.
 
Yeah, these days I wouldn't buy an ext. just to open it up. Back 3ish years ago when I was buying my 2TB ext WD Essentials, there were stories that some shipped with WD Blacks inside. I even remember reading 1 post where the guy said he ended up with a 3yr warranty even though the ext's only had a 1yr ..
 
bildad said:
These are great little drives for just about everything.
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I tried to use one as a hockey puck for my son's practice since the coach was late. It didn't work after. I guess it's not as versatile or as durable as WD claims :mad:
 
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