(Old Model) WD My Passport Ultra 1 TB Portable External USB 3.0 Hard Drive with Auto Backup, Black

I have had this drive since 2014, and I use it to stream my ripped CDs into Apple Music App. I have it attached to my iMac with an 1m Audioquest Carbon Coaxial cable. It's amazes me that this drive is now 11-years young. LOL

Ya con 12 años de uso y sigue funcionando. Western digital hace productos de mucha calidad. Muy recomendado.

I told in another review, believe it was of the AmazonBasics USB hub, that I live in an area prone to power outages. This is especially true in spring/summer. We seem to have a daily thunderstorm that rolls through right around 5 PM. I primarily work as a construction engineer and keep all of my files, blueprints, receipts, appointments on an external hard drive. I spent most of March of this year, having clients calling me and asking, "Could you give me the exact price you charged me?" and "What time are you supposed to be at my business tomorrow?" Well, my external was a Western Digital Elements, it required AC power. So, when the power was out, I had to say either, "Don't know, can't access my files" or "I'm not home right now, but will check as soon as I'm there." It was becoming very frustrating. I'm also a neat freak and my work desk at home was getting cluttered.I had seen these Passports for years, but there were always a lot of reviews that talked about failures. The Elements version hadn't gave me a single problem, so I come from the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" group. Then I saw these Passport Ultra's and there were enough positive reviews to make me buy one.With this little hard drive, I'll be able to access anything I need for work as long as my laptop has a charge. Very nice, welcome me to the 21st century now.I will further this by saying I did go in the hard drive's software and deselect the auto-backup and security functions. I don't like anything on my computer doing something without me telling it to. Seems those auto programs pick the worst times to start running. If you want to disable that part, it's very easy and takes all of maybe 5 seconds. The nice thing is you still leave the software on the hardware. You just disable it from running, so there's no long removal process or startup errors when the drive decides to look for its software. I had that problem with an old HP External I had. I had to remove its (HP) auto backup software, then every time I booted the computer, I would get an error.I can tell you my experience with externals. I've had over 10, I try to use one per year, then store it. I really don't know how much brand name matters. I had one HP external that worked flawlessly, then had the one that had an error on every boot. I've had two WD MyBooks without problem. Three WD Elements without any problems, Two Seagate without problems. Two iOmega that died within the first 3 months of use, both of them died. And one Toshiba that worked well. This WD Passport is my first portable, USB powered external and so far it has worked perfectly. I'll try to review all the products I'm using to convert my home office into a less cluttered, neat office space with at least, a little less reliance on power supply.

I did a careful product analysis before I purchased this product. Looking for additional highly portable storage I had originally looked at installing a hard drive in my laptop optical bay using a spare 500GB 5400RPM HDD I had laying around. Unfortunately another laptop had a hard drive failure and it became necessary to use that spare drive as a replacement for the failed drive. At that point I was no longer sure how to proceed. The last time I shopped for external storage was 5 years ago. I bought a WD My Book at the time. 2 years later the enclosure took a nosedive but the drive was still good, needless to say that drive got transplanted into a new enclosure and is still running fine today, problem being it is pretty large (3.5" form factor), has its own power supply, and not very portable. So going into this process I was looking for something powered only by a USB connection, and preferably smaller than a thick trade paperback. Well, I was in for a bit of a surprise. The new portable drives were about as big as my iphone and all were powered by USB connection. Big plus for me. At that point it became a maximum dollar to storage to quality equation, with a optical bay HDD still being an option. Since I could do that for $65 or so and use an older 250GB HDD I had laying around that became a base line for my budget, however I wanted at least 500GB since I am busy backing up my media library, and wanted it handy for travel. Essentially the more storage the better. Speed was not so much of a factor, raw storage was, and since I run a machine with Ubuntu 12.04 the various manufacturer provided apps and encryption software for Windows or Mac were a complete non factor.So basically the biggest bang for my dollar is what I was looking at. Upon further research I discovered the best storage range was definitely items in the 1TB range. Not only were they the same size as 500GB solutions, they only cost roughly $10 more. 2TB solutions were thicker, and the price jump was much larger. 1TB it was. I narrowed it down to three choices. The Seagate Backup Plus, the HGST Touro Mobile, and the WD My Passport Ultra all priced at roughly $70. So why the Ultra? It fit all my requirements, had a smaller form factor, lighter weight, equal storage, similar price, best benchmarks, and I have had great luck with WD HDD's in the past.It arrived yesterday, took one minute to set up and less than half an hour to get all my data transferred. It is very quiet, and gives off very little heat. Pretty sturdy construction. I will definitely update this if any problems occur, but for now I got exactly what I was looking for, quickly, and at a great price.