World’s First Thunderbolt Portable Hard Disk

Western Digital has unveiled the world’s first Thunderbolt portable hard disk, the My Passport Pro. I’ve got one unit for this review, and even although I’ve hardly got started, I can’t wait to share some first impressions. The My Passport Pro is not just portable, which does not require external power supply, but it’s also a RAID storage. That’s right, there are two disks in there.

The first thought when I picked it up was that, wow, this portable storage is really hefty. It’s heavy, and it is physically larger compared with the svelte My Passport line of disks that we’ve grown accustomed to. Well, there are two disks in there, that’s why it’s heavy, and it’s larger.

A nice feature is that the Thunderbolt cable comes fixed to the My Passport Pro. It’s wrapped around in a groove that runs on along the side of the enclosure. Not only do you not have to carry a separate Thunderbolt cable, but this is also a neat cable storage solution.

The My Passport Pro can be configured in either RAID0 (stripped, for speed) or RAID1 (mirrored, for redundancy). There are two models, one with 2 TB of total storage capacity, and the other with 4 TB of total storage capacity. Remember, of course, that in RAID1, you’ve only half the amount of usable space.

The Thunderbolt interface does mean that the My Passport Pro is designed to be used with a Mac computer. OS X software is included to configure the My Passport Pro.

The retail price of the 2 TB model is S$499, and S$699 for the 4 TB model.

Stay tuned for a more in-depth review coming soon!