- WD - My Passport Ultra for Mac 4TB External USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive with Hardware Encryption - Silver. Model: WDBPMV0040BSL-WESN. Rating, 4.5 out of 5 with 208 reviews (208) Price Match Guarantee. $119.99 Your price for this item is $119.99.
- The WD My Passport Ultra comes with the software which can be easily installed on your Windows/Mac computer. After connecting the WD My Passport Ultra 2TB setup to the computer, launch the application found inside the drive and follow the on-screen tips to set up the drive.
- My Passport For Mac Or My Passport Ultra Lite
- How To Use My Passport For Mac
- My Passport For Mac Help
- My Passport For Mac Vs My Passport Ultra
- Using My Passport For Mac
In this WD My Passport Ultra Review, all the things about this drive are discussed honestly.
Your My Passport Ultra for Mac drive is formatted as a single HSF+J partition for compatibility with macOS X operating systems. If you want to use the drive with a Windows computer, see Reformatting the Drive and Troubleshooting. Physical Description As shown in figure 2, the My Passport Ultra for Mac drive has: A USB 3.1 interface port.
Western Digital My Passport Ultra Portable Drive is one of the popular external hard drives among the consumers who know the importance of data, and it's backup.
Isn't It?
Not the Number One but still WD My Passport Ultra is a high-profile name in hard drives list and one of the smart portable model of its family.
WD(Western Digital) My Passport Ultra Review 1TB & 2TB
The new Western Digital My Passport has also earned the title of Editor's choice in our list of Top Ten best external hard drives. Western Digital My Passport Ultra also gives the storage capacity up to 3Tb, but this is not the only cool thing about WD. We can also say it wd SmartWare review due to its popularity
It is on the list of best sellers due to the versatility, affordable price, performing excellently in the areas of security and backup software, and in numerous help and support channels. You can use WD My Passport Ultra for MAC and PC both, but there are a certain set of actions you need to take to work with MAC because by default it comes prepared to work with Windows use.
WD My Passport is available in different colors including the black, white, blue and berry with an option for more than 20 mix-and-match colors available in WD Grip Packs. WD can easily fit in your pocket due to it's compact size. Also, Backup Software is very easy to use, and the encryption of drive is totally lossless and has no effect on the performance of the drive. The speed gives almost equal to Seagate backup plus.
WD My Passport Ultra is the successor of the WD My Passport Edge and way faster than WD Edge. The WD Ultra offers a generous amount of storage capacity of more than 4TB Previously we had wd my passport ultra 2tb and wd my passport ultra 1tb which are still available in the market. SmartWare backup software is included with the drive. The design of the drive is very attractive, and when combined with selected colors it looks beautiful while holding in your hand. Didn't Agreed with me? Try yourself.
In simple words, the WD Ultra is a little wonder in the world of external hard drives that is compact and offers a generous amount of storage capacity to carry your data or backup, and while ready to go with you on travel and giving an excellent performance the new. The editor of wd my passport ultra review recommends My Passport Ultra is an excellent buy.
Design and Features
You will be misconceived if you see the WP My Passport Ultra because it looks similar to My Passport Edge. The only difference that can be pointed out is the word 'Edge' is replaced with 'Ultra' on the casing. Either way the drive is very much similar to it's predecessor. Being light weight and compact the drive feels sturdy a little bit.
The New My Passport Ultra has dimensions of 3.21 x 4.33 x 0.83 and weighs 0.5 lb.A Mirco-USB 3.0 port is available on the side of the drive to connect the USB cable that comes along with the drive purchase. This cable serves for the power and data tasks both the same time and gets relaxed still more to come. WD Ultra is also backward compatible means if you wanted to use it for USB 2.0 you can use it but to get the maximum performance of WD Ultra; the recommendation is to use it with USB 3.0.Few people might think what is wd smartware but this is it
As i stated above that the drive comes prepared to work with windows directly as the drive is preformatted NTFS for Windows. In Case you are MAC user and want to use the Ultra for you MAC then it's a simple process to reformat the drive for your MACs(HFS+). The backup software called WD SmartWare is also included in the drive to take the necessary backups as WD Drive Utilities and WD Security.
The Drive also comes with 3 years limited warranty so in case you got an issue with the drive you replace it from the vendors. You can upgrade to the WD SmartWare Pro version at free of cost. This piece of software works with all external hard drives, also the drives offered by other vendors. If you are Ultra user, you can activate the WD SmartWare at two times on two different computers. This brief wd my passport ultra review is best to select a drive for you.
WD SmartWare is not required to install for the drive to work. But it is useful. The WD Drive Utilities contains the utilities that are responsible for the drive status, drive functionality and to reformat it. Your contents in the drive can be secured or password protected with the WD security.
The drive supports very strong encryption and the password selected once is always the key to access your data on the drive. MAC users also pay close attention because both of these WD Drive Utilities and WD Security are available for them as well as Windows users.
But WD SmartWare is not available for MAC users it is only available for the Windows users. Nothing to worry for the MAC users as there is always a solution for a problem. Then can install Time Machine with to take the Backup of their data. Though WD SmartWare performs the very handy job for this task but with Time Machine that's not a big deal.
This software is very smart it automatically takes the backup of your important data to incase you are not a computer geek. The best thing about WD SmartWare is that now you can take backups to Dropbox Online service just you need a dropbox account. How to format a hard drive for mac. Then leave it on the software.
WD wd SmartWare review Ultra Performance
While using the 4TB version with USB 3.0 the Ultra performed 130MPs for writing that is close to the double of My Passport Edge, and it gave 118MBps speed for reading which is also the double of WD Edge. So this is the fasted score for any USB 3.0 external hard drive i have tested so far.I hope that in this brief wd my passport ultra review we explained well abou this little wonder now it's your turn to take action.After getting your hard drive the very first thing to get the drive in use is to make partitions of it and see this guide how to make partitions for more information.
Final Verdict
My Passport For Mac Or My Passport Ultra Lite
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Contents
- 4 Final Verdict
Can I Use WD Hard Drive on Mac and PC
Before you get the answer, you must figure out what kind of file system can work well on both the macOS and the Windows system. macOS supports a handful of common file systems - HFS+, FAT32, and exFAT, with read-only support for NTFS. While Windows employs two major file systems: NTFS and FAT. FAT was inherited from old DOS and has exFAT as its later extension. In addition, the ReFS file system was developed as a new generation file system for server computers starting from Windows Server 2012.
That is to say, only FAT32 and exFAT can work on both Mac and PC. If you want to share digital files between Mac and Windows system easily, you must convert WD My Passport to FAT or exFAT. Here are three ways to format a WD My Passport, follow any one of them to convert to FAT.
- Solution 1. Format WD HDD with Software (FREE)
How to Format WD My Passport in Windows Platform (Free)
You can format a Western Digital My Passport external hard drive to ex-FAT or FAT32 format using a free ex-FAT or FAT32 converter - EaseUS Partition Master or use built-in applications Windows.
Solution 1. Format WD My Passport Using Software (Free)
It is a wise choice to use a professional format tool. With the help of EaseUS Partition Master Free, you can perfectly bypass the format limitation of the Windows disk management tool and help you format WD My Passport to FAT32 or exFAT easily without any obstacles. What's more, this Windows partition software helps you create, resize, clone, move, and merge partitions without difficulty. Follow the details below to convert WD My Passport to FAT32 or exFAT.
Step 1: Launch EaseUS Partition Master, right-click the partition on your external hard drive/USB/SD card which you want to format and choose the 'Format' option.
Step 2: Assign a new partition label, file system (NTFS/FAT32/EXT2/EXT3), and cluster size to the selected partition, then click 'OK'.
Step 3: In the Warning window, click 'OK' to continue.
Step 4: Click the 'Execute Operation' button in the top-left corner to review the changes, then click 'Apply' to start formatting your external hard drive/USB/SD card.
Solution 2. Format WD My Passport Using File Explorer
Windows limits FAT32 partitions to 32GB. It does not offer the ability to format a drive larger than 32GB to FAT32, the only available choices are NTFS or exFAT. If you want to format your WD My Passport to FAT32, you must make sure that the size is smaller than 32GB. If it is larger than 32GB, you can only format it to exFAT.
Step 1. Open Windows File Explorer, locate and right-click on WD My Passport that you need to format, select 'Format'.
Step 2. Rename the drive, reset its file system to FAT32 or exFAT.
Step 3. Click 'Start' to begin the formatting.
How to Format WD My Passport in macOS/OS X Platform
The easiest way to format the drive to FAT32 or exFAT is by using macOS's built-in Disk Utility for FAT32 or exFAT.
Tips: The instructions below are designed to help repartition and format a hard drive. Once the process begins, all the data on the drive will be lost!
Step 1. Connect WD My Passport to your Mac.
Step 2. Once that's done, double left-click on the Mac HD, the internal Mac hard drive visible on the top-right corner of the desktop screen.Select 'Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility'.
Step 3. Select your WD My Passport on the sidebar, choose 'Erase'.
Step 4. Rename the drive, select the 'Volume Format' drop-down list and choose 'MS-DOS (FAT)' or 'ex-FAT File System'. Then click 'Erase'.
Wait for the process to complete and let the macOS erase data on the drive and reformat it by FAT32 or ex-FAT format. Then, you can use the drive in macOS or OS X as a regular hard drive.
Difference Between FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS
FAT is known as the File Allocation Table. The successive major versions of the FAT format are named after the number of table element bits: FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32. FAT32 is the oldest of the three file systems available to Windows. Individual files on a FAT32 drive can't be over 4 GB in size. A FAT32 partition must also be less than 8 TB, which admittedly is less of a limitation unless you're using super-high-capacity drives.
How To Use My Passport For Mac
exFAT, Extended File Allocation Table, is optimized for flash drives. It was added to older versions of Windows with updates to Windows XP and Windows Vista. This file system doesn't have the limitations of FAT32. You can use it when you need a bigger file size and partition limits than FAT32 offers.
My Passport For Mac Help
NTFS, NT File System, is the modern file system Windows likes to use by default. It is packed with modern features not available to FAT32 and exFAT. However, it only works with all versions of Windows, but read-only with Mac by default.
If you want to use WD My Passport or any other hard drive on Mac and PC, you need to format a Western Digital My Passport external hard drive in exFAT or FAT32 format.
My Passport For Mac Vs My Passport Ultra
Tips to Avoid Formatting WD My Passport Without Backup
Just as I have mentioned above, once the process begins, all the data on the drive will be lost. To avoid unnecessary data loss issues, we highly recommended all users extract or back up important data to another device or partition in advance. You can copy files one by one to a new disk or drive. If you have quite a lot of data to be transferred, professional backup software shall be your best choice. Here we recommend you try EaseUS Todo Backup which allows you to directly back up target data with simple steps.
Step 1: Launch EaseUS Todo Backup software and then choose 'File Backup', 'Disk/partition Backup' or 'System Backup' for different backup purpose.
Step 2: Choose the system, disk partition, files or apps that you want to back up. Then select a destination where you want to store the backup file.
Step 3: Click 'Proceed' to start the data backup process.
Hot Topics - People Also Ask These Questions
What is the difference between NTFS, fat32, and exFAT?
NTFS is the commonly used file system for Windows internal drives. Windows OS can only be installed on an NTFS partition. FAT32 is an older file system used for external drives due to its great compatibility. exFAT is a replacement for FAT32, which is not as compatible as FAT32 but without the limitations of FAT32.
Using My Passport For Mac
Can I use WD hard drive on Mac and PC?
Yes. If you want to use WD My Passport or any other hard drive on Mac and PC, you need to format a Western Digital My Passport external hard drive in exFAT or FAT32 format.
Can I convert exFAT to NTFS without losing data?
You are unable to directly convert exFAT to NTFS without losing data, as there is no such utility that can help you perform the exFAT to NTFS conversion. You can back up exFAT partition data to another drive and then format the exFAT partition to NTFS with EaseUS Partition Master Free.
How do I format my WD Passport?
Step 1. Run EaseUS Partition Master, right-click the hard drive partition you intend to format and choose Format.
Step 2. In the new window, set the Partition label, File system (NTFS/FAT32/EXT2/EXT3/exFAT), and Cluster size for the partition to be formatted, then click OK.
Step 3. Click OK in it to continue.
Step 4. Click the Execute Operation button on the top-left corner to review the changes, then click Apply.
Conclusion
You can format your Western Digital My Passport external hard drive to FAT32 or exFAT format to transfer the data between a Mac and Windows system conveniently. According to the solutions above, the EaseUS partition tool stands out for its convenience and easiness. It's always your best choice.