Western Digital My Passport Ultra (1TB) Review

Introduction

If your backup needs amount to only a few gigabytes of data and documents, you don't have to spend much at all these days—if anything at all. You can snag a USB flash drive or two for under $10, and that should suffice. And cloud-based storage via Dropbox, SkyDrive, or Google Drive is a reliable, free option (well, so long as you don’t mind if the NSA, in theory, caches your data).

But privacy concerns are far from the only reason to back up your data on a local drive of some kind. For one thing, you may want access to your data when Net access is down. Or perhaps you have too much of it to stuff up or down a narrow-bandwidth pipe. If you want to back up a whole multi-terabyte hard drive (or several of them), you can store up to 4TB on just one platter-based drive for about   these days (in the form of a large, non-portable desktop model). Try doing that in the cloud, and you’ll likely be spending hundreds of dollars a year, and waiting ages to upload it all.

But if your backup and storage needs fit somewhere in the middle, between the amount of cloud storage you can get for free and the massive space available from desktop-size drives, a portable hard drive is a good choice—especially if you want to backup files on different computers.

Western Digital’s My Passport Ultra is a good option—especially for those inclined to use the software that comes with the drive. Portable USB hard drives like these have largely become commodity items, but it's the little things that set one apart from another. Here, the WD software suite that the company includes is easy to use and surprisingly handy. It covers the basics of backup and drive security, while also letting you easily back up to other external drives attached to your PC, or shunt your files to Dropbox.

This drive is also one of the fastest portable drives we’ve tested over USB 3.0. Plus, its three-year warranty bests some of the competition, and if you care about appearances, it comes in a host of colors. Marks against? It looks and feels plasticky, and at about an  street price for its 1TB version (), it costs a bit more at that capacity than many competing drives from Seagate, Toshiba, and others.