Western Digital announces first-ever 2TB capacity 2.5-inch My Passport for $250

Élyse Betters | Mar 21 2012 - 7:28 am PT

Hard-drive maker Western Digital is the first-ever to unveil a 2TB capacity 2.5-inch portable external hard drive.

Western Digital announced the drive will first be put into the My Passport family, which previously only offered up to 1TB of storage, but the doubled-capacity external is still a condensed single-volume drive. 9to5Mac reviewed the Western Digital My Passport Studio in September 2011 and walked away very impressed with the 1TB 2.5-inch flavor.

Like the earlier version, the larger My Passport is available in various colored finishes that make its shell resilient to abrasions. The device is NTFS reformatted but easily reformatted to Mac OS, and it supports USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 for trucking large amounts of data.

More information is available below.

The 2TB portable drive is available now with a two-year warranty for $249.99.

It also features WD SmartWare for automatic backup and WD Security for password safety and hardware encryption for Windows users.

It is worth mentioning that this latest portable employs perpendicular magnetic recording technology, but it is widely assumed heat-assisted magnetic recording is a must to continue increasing storage space.

Seagate recently demonstrated its first hard drive technology with HAMR to reach 1TB per square inch. The company noted today’s 2.5-inch hard drives using PMR have a top capacity of 750 GB at about 500 GB per square inch. However, Western Digital’s latest offering definitely proves otherwise.