Western Digital announced late Tuesday that it would be adding another model to its popular My Passport line of portable drives. This new drive has a capacity of 2TB, making it the first single-volume portable external hard drive with that capacity.
Prior to this announcement the My Passport line of hard drives offered storage options up to 1TB. The drives in this line are all 2.5 inch, portable drives which are bus powered. The 2TB option will maintain those criteria. The drive will support USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 and can be formatted NTFS or Mac OS.
Western Digital claims this drives will come in cases with premium finishes which will be far more resistant to scratches and finger prints. The drives come with a suite of WD software including WD SmartWare automatic backup software and WD Security for password protection and hardware encryption.
It's currently predicted that 2TB is the absolute maximum amount of storage that can be crammed onto a 2.5 inch drive that use perpendicular magnetic recording technology. Seagate recently announced a new technique which has the potential to allow larger amounts of storage onto these drives. Seagate claims that technique allows them to reach 1TB per square inch of drive.
For now we'll have to settle for 2TB of total storage on a 2.5 inch drive. The 2TB My Passport drives are available right now in white, blue, silver, red, or black for a price of $250. Do any of you use a portable external drive enough to justify having 2TB of storage?
