WD launch "My Passport Ultra" USB3 drives with backup to Dropbox

WD My Passport Ultra

Western Digital, one of the biggest hard drive manufacturers, have just released their latest portable drive, the My Passport Ultra, which has some interesting features

 Portable hard drives are very handy to have around, especially as the size of the media we need to move around keeps growing and growing. Western Digital have been in the business for years and their range of portable drives is excellent. Their latest product is a slim package which can contain a 500GB, 1TB or 2TB disk in a protective case. The drive is self powered via USB (no more ugly power supply) and supports USB2 and USB3 transfer speeds. If you have a computer with USB3 you should be able to transfer data to the drive around 3 times faster than USB2.

Dropbox integration

Obviously one of the things you would use an external drive for is backup, so the My Passport Ultra comes with WD's "SmartWare" automatic backup software. This gives you an easy way to back up data to the drive. If you upgrade this to "SmartWare Pro" you can also backup to your DropBox account or more usefully, backup the contents of your DropBox to the drive.

The drive also comes with a security utility that lets you use built in hardware encryption to password protect your files, useful if you want to use it for storing sensitive data.

Physically the drive is small enough and light enough to carry without effort and it comes in a range of four colours (which might be useful to tell them apart) It has a three year warranty and is available now online and in stores. The 500GB model is priced at $79.99 and the 1TB model is $119.99. The 2TB model will be released in Q3. The upgrade to Smartware Pro is currently $19.95 for up to three computers and $39.95 for up to 10 computers.