Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

WD casts down the first Thunderbolt bus-powered portable dual hard drive

western digital casts down my passport pro the first thunderbolt powered portable dual external hard drive
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Western Digital, one of the computing industry’s big storage makers, just announced a new line of My Passport Pro portable hard drives. What makes these stand out is the fact the company claims they’re the first portable Thunderbolt bus-powered dual disk external drives.

Sporting a pair of 2.5 inch drives, the new My Passport Pro is encased in an aluminum shell, and can shuttle data at speeds of up to 233MB/s. You’ll also be able to configure the My Passport Pro’s drives in either RAID 0 or RAID 1 as well. On top of that, Western Digital outfitted the new My Passport Pro with a built-in Thunderbolt cable, so there’s no danger of ever misplacing the cord.

“The only Thunderbolt dual-drive solution that’s bus-powered, WD’s My Passport Pro enhances the workflow of mobile creative professionals by providing fast transfers and data protection for the large amounts of digital content they generate outside the studio,” said Western Digital exec Jim Welsh in a prepared statement. “From photographers, videographers and musicians to graphic designers and architects, people who depend on portable storage for their livelihood will find My Passport Pro defines a new level of performance, reliability and especially portability.”

As the above quote indicates, with the My Passport Pro line, Western Digital is targeting creative professionals who regularly deal with large files.

The My Passport Pro is available now in two models: a 2TB drive for $299 and a 4TB drive for $429.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments below.

Editors' Recommendations

Mike Epstein
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Michael is a New York-based tech and culture reporter, and a graduate of Northwestwern University’s Medill School of…
How to watch Intel’s big Computex 2024 keynote tonight
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger delivers the Day 1 closing keynote at IAA Mobility

Intel is the next big name that will be talking up its upcoming products and technologies at Computex, with a big keynote address from CEO Pat Gelsinger scheduled for tonight. While we won't be talking about his jacket like with the Nvidia CEO's, we may well hear about the CPUs that are going up against AMD's Zen 5 later this year.

Alongside new chip announcements, AI will certainly be a major component of the announcement, as it has been with just about everyone else's so far.
How to watch Intel's Computex 2024 keynote
Intel will hold its keynote at 11 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT on June 3 (that's 11 a.m. local time on June 4 for anyone in attendance in Taiwan). If you want to watch it live, Intel has a livestream planned for its own website where you can register your interest and watch along at home.

Read more
The Mac vs. PC war just took an unexpected turn
Justin Long sits with a MacBook and drinks tea.

He's still thought of as the "I'm a Mac" guy by many, but Justin Long has been working with everyone but Apple in recent years -- Huawei, Intel, and now Qualcomm. In a surprise 30-second video shown during Qualcomm's Computex keynote, Long was caught searching for a Snapdragon-powered PC to replace his MacBook.

In the original Apple TV commercials broadcast almost two decades ago, Long's "Mac guy" character teased John Hodgman's "PC guy" character about everything Macs could do better than PCs. The saga continued when Apple got Hodgman back to talk about the M1 chips in 2020, and Intel responded by hiring Long to mock Apple's Touch Bar in 2021.

Read more
AMD Zen 5: Everything we know about AMD’s next-gen CPUs
The AMD Ryzen 5 8600G APU installed in a motherboard.

AMD Zen 5 is the next-generation Ryzen CPU architecture for Team Red. And after a major showing at Computex 2024, it's ready for a July launch. AMD promises major performance advantages for the new architecture that will give it a big leap in performance in gaming and productivity tasks, and the company also claims it will have major leads over Intel's top 14th-generation alternatives.

We'll need to wait for the release to know for sure how these chips perform, but here's what we know about Zen 5 so far.
Zen 5 release date and availability
AMD confirmed in January 2024 that it was on track to launch Zen 5 sometime in the "second half of the year," and backed that up at its Computex 2024 showing, where it promised the first four chips from the Ryzen 9000 generation will launch in July. That will be the Ryzen 9 9950X, the Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 5 9600X. Additional non-X and X3D variants are expected in the months that follow.

Read more