Both drives offer a three-year limited warranty and WD Discovery software (including social media and cloud importing, WD Backup and 256-bit AES hardware encryption).
For those looking for a more premium portable hard drive, the My Passport Ultra features a modern metal design and USB-C technology out of the box. Western Digital is using a 1TB WD Blue 5400 RPM hard drive with. The 5TB My Passport drive is actually the slimmest of its capacity in the WD lineup. The WD My Passport Ultra 1TB drive that we are looking at today measures in at 110.5mm x 82mm x 15.4mm with a weight of 5.44 ounces. What’s the difference? A WD spokesperson said: “The My Passport drives are the best choice for most everyday consumers. WD also sells the My Passport Ultra drive. However, 5TB of slightly faster (5,526rpm) spinning Seagate Backup Plus Portable external storage, which is shingled as well, costs $109.99 (£98.66) on Amazon cheaper still. The rest of us can enjoy 5TB capacity for $0.026/GB. High-intensity gamers will do better with external SSD storage. This pricing makes them affordable for desktop, notebook and low-intensity gaming systems. A 5TB model costs $125.99 on Amazon £112.99 in the UK from Scan. My Passport is warranted for three years. The 4TB drive should not suffer from this effect. In other words, the 5TB drive will seem slower as it fills up and files get deleted to make space for newer ones. Writing such files over deleted files will be slower because of the shingled media effect. In practice that means,, 100 to 115MB/sec when reading large sequential files. Data is transferred to and from the drive at up to 5Gbit/s. It can also backup Facebook, Dropbox and Google Drive (cloud) account data, such as photos, videos, music and documents. WD’s Discovery software provides management functions, and enables the drive, with included Backup utility, to backup host system files on a settable schedule. Smaller randomly-addressed files are stored temporarily in a cache and then, when the drive is idle, written out in a sequential manner, with address translation to speed the writing process. Large sequential files are accepted by the drive and written with no interruption. Fresh data writes to empty tracks proceed as normal. This slows the data rewrite process as blocks of tracks have to be read, the data altered, and then the block re-written to the drive. The 5TB drive, claimed to be the thinnest such drive available, uses drive-managed shingling.
The case is part-diagonally ribbed and available in blue for Mac and black, red and a different blue for Windows. CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random read/write speeds.Pros and cons: Clearly limited by the hard drive and not the USB 3. The 4TB and 5TB drive’s extra thickness and near doubled weight reflects the two extra platters inside. The device has a SATA interface, spins at 5,400rpm, and the actual capacities available are 1TB, 2 TB, 4TB and 5TB, using 1TB platters.