With its latest Passport effort, Western Digital has delivered a drive with an eye not only to portability, but also to style. The new range comes in four colours – titanium, red, blue, and black.
Style, however, is not everything, and thankfully the Ultra 500GB has handy physical size, excellent build quality, and a speedy USB 3 interface on its side. In fact, in our testing it’s proven to be one of the fastest portable USB 3 drives we’ve seen; USB 2 performance lags behind other models, but far from catastrophically so.
The Passport Ultra comes with a suite of utilities, including WD Smartware for backing up your data (which includes Dropbox functionality), and WD Drive Utilities and WD Security. The latter is easily the more useful, letting you password protect your drive.
For the speed alone we’d recommend this, but the package as a whole is even better.
Verdict
The Ultra 500GB has handy physical size, excellent build quality, and a speedy USB 3 interface on its side.
Specs
