It’s not easy to make portable drives exciting, but Western Digital is doing its best today. WD has launched a refreshed My Passport line of drives that tops out with a 5 terabyte option that’s just 0.75 inch thick. By comparison, the company’s previous 4TB portable drive is 0.8 inch thick. So while trimming off 0.05 inches isn’t exactly substantial, you do get 25% more storage in your pocketable portable hard drive.
As usual, WD will ship a My Passport for Mac model (in midnight blue, rather than tired silver), which comes with a removable USB-C cable. The black, light blue and red models (designed for Windows and other operating systems) will sport USB-A cables. All of the drives are USB 3.0, which is more than adequate to handle hard drive speeds.
The new My Passport drives include access to software for password protection and 256-bit encryption, social media backup and cloud storage (Google Drive, Facebook and Dropbox) and other utilities. WD says the drives are available now, with a starting MSRP of $79.99 for the 1TB model. That’s pretty high compared to similar drives on the market. But given that the company’s existing My Passport drives currently start at $50 for the 1TB model on Amazon, we expect street pricing of the new models to be similar.
