Western Digital undertook a major remake of its My Passport portable hard drives on Tuesday that both claimed a first in capacity and gave it a fresher design. The new versions are the first to ever have 2TB of storage in a portable-sized drive. WD hasn't said how the drive is arranged, although it's more likely to be two 1TB disk than the still-distant single 2TB drives.
Western Digital today unveiled three additions to its external drive line. An updated My Passport Essential is Western Digital's smallest portable drive, and has a storage capacity of 500GB with USB 3.0 new to the group. The My Passport Essential SE portable drive comes in either 750GB or 1TB capacity and also uses USB 3.0. The My Book Essential desktop external drive also now reaches 3TB with the faster speed intact.
WD has worked together with design Sstudents at the California State University to create five new limited edition My Passport Essential portable drives. The limited edition designs are now available online through WD and in Best Buy stores. Boom Box, Black Hole, Cityscape, Fuchsia Leaf and Wave all have custom imprints instead of the usual solid colors.
Western Digital has expanded its line of My Passport SE drives with two new capacities, 750GB and 1TB, formatted in HFS+ for Macs. Despite the higher capacities, both external drives still draw power from a USB connection rather than a dedicated AC adapter.
Western Digital has expanded its line of storage products with the My Passport AV. The portable drive is geared for video storage and playback, with support for a variety of game consoles, TVs, Blu-ray players, or other devices that can directly connect to a USB drive.
WD on Monday introduced the My Passport Studio portable drives formatted for Macs. Like the desktop-sized My Books, the 2.5-inch disks sport e-paper displays that show information even when the drive is not powered. The Studios also have a fast FireWire 800 interface, a USB 2.0 port and 256-bit hardware-based encryption.
Today's deals at DealNN include a variety of deals on electronics from iPods to external hard drives. Most notable today is the Western Digital My Passport Studio external hard drive. This hard drive is pre-formatted for Mac users and offers FireWire, and USB interface options. It is currently priced at $99.99, which is a price reduction of $55 off the original price of $154.99, and includes FREE shipping after mail in rebate from MacMall.
Western Digital on Monday took its own turn at media hubs by introducing the HD TV Media Player. In place of using a network connection, the company is taking advantage of its skill with external storage to let users locally transfer content: users can attach up to two USB hard drives, certain portable media players or other devices (including the company's MyBook drives) and browse the contents of the drive with an on-screen menu and a bundled remote.
