WD’s portable drives turn 10, celebrates with metal

If you own an external drive from Western Digital, time to sing a line of “Happy Birthday” and buy yourself a slice of cake (you deserve it), because WD’s external drives hit the big 1-0 this week.

That’s right, this week WD’s My Passport series of external drives turn 10, with that decade release selling over 60 million drives, resulting to around 42,000 petabytes of storage that has been sold.

If you’ve never heard of a petabyte, it’s a number even bigger than mega, giga, or terabyte, and it’s so big that 42,000 petabytes actually translates into 42,000,000,000 gigabytes.

To celebrate this ridonkulous amount of storage that has been sold — which is more a celebration and anniversary of the product — Western Digital has released a special edition of the drive, as you do.

While it’s not guaranteed to last ten years (sorry, but that’s an impossible promise of any hard drive), WD’s My Passport Ultra will come in two editions for the celebration, with the metal edition and anniversary edition both incorporating a radial spin aluminium enclosure to make the drive look special and feel more solid. WD’s SmartWare Pro software is also included, now with Dropbox integration to allow content backed up to the hard drive to be sent to the cloud.

“Ten years is a milestone by any consumer technology standard, and having the opportunity to consistently reinvent a product line like My Passport to suit the changing needs of consumers and creative professionals is something we are especially proud of,” said Tony Tate, Vice President and General Manager of WD’s Content Solutions division.

“We thank all of our customers for their ongoing feedback over the years, which have helped make My Passport the most popular external hard drives ever.”

The Anniversary Edition is the Metal Edition in a different colour. That is all.

With two versions, you’re probably wondering what the difference is. Well, we’ve checked, and it’s paint, or more specifically, a finish.

As such, WD’s My Passport Ultra Metal Edition comes in 1TB and 2TB editions, both with USB 3.0 ports and in a blue, silver, and bronze finish, while the WD My Passport Ultra Anniversary Edition is exactly the same, except in a limited edition champagne-gold colour, as you do.

Whichever you go with, the pricing remains the same, with the 1TB being sold for $119.99 RRP, while the 2TB model grabs the $179.99 recommended retail price, with availability exclusively from Harvey Norman in Australia.