Customer Ratings & Reviews

The disk works well, however the box describes that it has a USB-C cable with a USB-A adapter. Only the USB-C box existed in the box. There was no USB-A. I needed to buy a new cable to connect to my computer with only USB-A ports.

Seems like an excellent b product, but there was no documentation on how to set it up for use it. Online is no help.

Extremely slow. Took like 4 hours to back up my system. I'm definitely returning for something better to suit my needs.

This unit will NOT function with older machines that have older USB or Windows XP OS's

After less than a year of use, the internals failed. All our photos and videos are now locked in and we cannot retrieve them without paying someone to recover them. This is a well known problem with the drives and WD will just tell you "it has failed...get another one." Unfortunately, I didn't find out they were junk until it was too late.

Now, I understand that not everyone has the same uses for hard drives. To be able to get the speed that the USB C cable provides is awesome! I have over 1tb of games loaded on there and there is room for more Steam purchases! Load speed and power draw is very minimal while providing high performance. Of course, your experience may vary depending on how you connect it. It can be compatible with a USB 3.0 port with the included adapter. Not sure if it's backward compatible with USB 2.0 but I'm sure it is. Did not expect to see 4tb in such a small package but after all this is 2018 and WD has an awesome product.

The WD My Passport Ultra 4TB Portable Hard Drive is an excellent choice as an external hard drive. It was very quick to get setup and connected to my computer. It connects into a USB C port on the computer. For a 4TB drive, it has a low profile and a pleasing look. There is an entire suite of software options that you can download to help with space management, security, and backing items up to the hard drive. It performs without any hiccups. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a lot of external hard drive space and solid performance that a drive that will work on any computer.

So this external driver is replacing an older HP external drive - about 10 year old one - and I was told it’s USB3 which it is. But I’m using on an USB3 port on a 2 year old computer with plenty of memory and chip speed and this passport is slower than the 10 year old HP. About 35MBs. WD says the speed in which it will run and what they tell consumers is “theoretical” NOT actual. WHAT!?!

The cable to drive connection is flimsy at best. If you bump the cable even in the slightest, the drive connection is broken. Very poor connection, will not buy this USB-C version again.

I usually stay away from the super huge external hard drives due to a bad experience I had a few years ago with a competing brand. Lets just say my whole music and movie collection was lost due to drive corruption. So now, years later I thought it would be best to make a backup of all of my important files that are spread across multiple drives. 4TB is more than I can fathom filling any time soon. But, it's good to know that it's there to expand to. Now, the best part of this drive is that it is USB-C (backwards compatible as well, so don't worry). I was blown away by the speeds in which my files transferred. While I didn't run any metrics, it was like night and day compared to any external hard drives I have used in the past. The form factor is very sleek (and as those of us down south say, it sure is purty!). It is literally a little bigger than my wallet. Therefore, it will easily fit in a backpack, briefcase or purse. I feel a ton more confident in this drive in its longevity. The key is to always have a backup! And this drive is the perfect one to backup ALL your devices to!!

stop working suddenly , fatal hardware error .....

Was told it was easy to use. Still can’t get it to function right. Haven’t taken time to concentrate on it but it is not as easy as “just plug it in”.

This item was recommended to me saying that's very good but unfortunately it did not work when I plugged it in, ending up returning it and getting a different kind

This drive comes with the USB-C cable and the WD Backup application that allows for a cloud based back-up. Drive connected to my laptop with no issues, the software installation started on its own and completed. The speed feels satisfatory without any noticeable delays.

I got this drive to back up a Seagate 4 TB external HDD. I haven't had the best luck with WD externals in the past (3 others I purchased all crashed within days of purchase), but I thought I'd give this one a shot. I haven't speed tested it or anything, but for my purposes, it works really well. It transferred about 3.5 TB of content from the original Seagate USB 3.0 external HDD to the WD in about 8-12 hours (I was away from the system when it completed download, so I can't say when it completed for sure). Aside from transfer speeds, I like that the included cable comes with a USB type-B adapter. What's more, the adapter has two notches that line up to two grooves on the cable, this helps to lock the adapter into place so it doesn't fall off when you disconnect the cable from the computer. It's a small touch, but one that I appreciate a lot. Overall, great HDD!

I acquired the WD My Passport Ultra 4TB external hard drive simply to have another backup storage device. I already have a 2 TB WD Elements Desktop WDBAAU0020HBK Hard drive and a 1 TB My Passport portable drive. But I say it never hurts to have redundant backups. As a side note, the variety of names of WD's drives really slays me. The name on the box and drive itself, WD My Passport Ultra, does not tell the full story. When I used "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" feature of Windows 10 to disconnect the drive, this program gave me the option to eject the "My Passport 260D," So I looked that up on the WD website and found that there are four versions of the My Passport Ultra with USB C connections: the 260D, 260E, 2605, and 2606. Who knows what the differences are. The site did not explain. I was particularly interested in two features of the newer Passport Ultra (besides its huge capacity). One is that it uses a USB 3.1 Type C interface (although it comes with a Type A adapter) supporting transfer rates of up to 10 GB per second. I thought this would be a perfect match with my laptop, which has a Thunderbolt Type C port (rated up to 40 GB per second). Second, the accompanying software includes easy importing from online sources such as Facebook, OneDrive, DropBox, and Google Drive. Backing up Facebook with one click was a major draw for me. Now, I normally prefer to back up my files in a rather old-school fashion, using a script containing commands such as: xcopy C:\Download\*.* E:\Filesbak\Download\ /E/V/S/D/Y/Z This good old DOS-based xcopy command, if working correctly, should copy all of the files from my Download folder to the location I specify on the external drive that I labeled E:\. But only if a file with the same name as an existing file is a newer version. That's what I want. I don't like keeping tons of multiple versions of my files in storage. The trouble is, after working for years, for some reason the xcopy command no longer checked to see if files with the same name were different. It insisted on copying all the files in the specified folder, even those that were identical. What a waste of time. So I was interested in checking out the backup software that came with the WD Passport Ultra. The written instructions that came with the drive were typical. One tiny paragraph explaining where to find PDF versions of the manual and how to register online, followed by a huge section on "binding individual arbitration and class action waiver agreement," safety, and other legal matters. In 24 languages. Fortunately, the installer for the important software, WD Discovery, was already on the drive. The software was both easy to install and intuitive to use, although I did download the manual to check on a couple of issues. Then, I downloaded the WD Backup program from a link on WD Discover and set up my first backup, selecting 185 GB worth of files from my solid state hard drive. Obviously, with all the steps necessary in backing up files, a USB 3.1 theoretical transfer rate of 10 GB/sec does not mean that the files will be backed up in 20 seconds, or even 20 minutes. I was not prepared, however, for how long this initial backup would take: 1 hour and 28 minutes. Curious about the transfer rate, I downloaded and ran the ATTO Disk Benchmark program, testing transfer rates from files sized from 512 bytes to 64 MB. The results showed an increase in speed until the 32 KB size, at which the rate plateaued at about 109 MB/sec. So that is the realistic transfer rate. You can set the backing up frequency to just about anything you want, so I set mine for a weekly backup. Because the future backups will include only new and revised files, the process should not be lengthy like the initial backup. One thing I did not like was that the backed up files were in a format that was not directly readable. For example, there is no possibility of browsing to a backed up PDF file and opening it with Adobe Acrobat. To read any files, they must be restored first. Furthermore, one can not restore a single file, only a folder full of files. I tried the process, and it was not difficult. You can restore the files to their original location or any location of your choosing. I restored a couple of folders to my desktop, and all of the files in them were readable and fine. As for the importing of files from online sources, I immediately ran into a problem trying to back up Facebook. My attempt resulting in the following message: "Facebook has detected WD Discovery isn't using a secure connection to transfer information. Until WD Discovery updates its security settings, you won't be able to use Facebook to log into it." I then scoured the user's manual, the WD help pages, and the entire Internet for a solution to the problem. Nothing. I email Western Digital and am still waiting to hear back from them. On the positive side, imports from Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive ran almost flawlessly. I got "Import Complete" messages from Google Drive and Dropbox, and when I browsed to the folders where I asked for the import, all the files were there and readable. However, with OneDrive I got the following message: "Import failed. Files imported 130 of 131" and it gave me the name of the file that failed to import. It was just a short text file and I have no idea why it was not backed up. So, it looks like this hard drive and its associated backup software are not perfect. But is that ever the case? The disk and software worked well enough and look like they will serve me well.

This is a great little hard drive. I wiped it and reformatted using the Mac OS Extended format and it works perfectly. This one hard drive takes up less room and gives me more space than 4 of my other external drives. What a time/space saver!

This died on me after 6 months. I can’t recover anything unless I pay thousands of dollars.

The WD My Passport Ultra 4TB drive is an excellent piece of hardware for backup and archival storage. Unfortunately the provided software doesn't really measure up, which is a shame. This is a commodity priced drive in a small, solid-feeling enclosure about the size of a double high 2.5" drive. The enclosure is sealed and appears very rugged. WD doesn't publish any specs on the actual hard drive itself, but it is pretty fast. It's a good choice for backup and archival secondary storage. The single connector is a USB-C connector that also powers the drive; no separate power brick. The supplied cable is a USB-C to USB-C cable with a USB-C-USB-A plug adapter. I tested the drive with Atto and it quickly peaked out at about ~115MB/sec write and ~130MB/sec read, with encryption on. In comparison, the internal 7200rpm SATA drive peaked at ~150MB/sec write and ~165MB/sec read with no encryption. Using file explorer to copy directories of photos, videos, and music yielded similar results. So, all things considered, performance is quite good for an external drive. Encryption requires a utility be installed to input the password for the encryption key and is currently available on Windows and IOS; Linux and Chrome users are currently out of luck. One very nice feature, the drive appears to be very low power for a performance drive; running it on my laptop didn't significantly shorten the battery life of the laptop. Very impressive. The supplied software was a distinct disappointment (NOTE: This is a windows only review, for IOS your mileage may vary). The WD Discovery program ran extremely slowly on both the desktop and laptop on which I installed it. It's really a system tray app manager, allowing you to access the utility, security, and backup apps. It took a long time to launch, and once launched, started the other apps sluggishly. The utility and security apps let you see the drive status, put it to sleep, set the key password, etc. The Backup utility was atrocious. The initial backup took almost 2hrs to complete, for a drive containing about 400GB. By contrast, a full backup using Acronis (my backup manager of choice) took about 35min backing up the same drive to the Ultra 4TB. The WD Backup utility can then be run on a scheduled basis, copying any new or modified files to a separate archive on the drive. I'll stick with Acronis. WD makes a older version of Acronis available for download (for free) and I recommend this over the supplied backup utility; it's far faster and more versatile. BTW., the backup utility is supposed to be able to back up some cloud stores, but it seems to have problems with the Facebook authentication protocols and fails. Hopefully that will get fixed soon. All in all, the hardware is a very solid drive that provides excellent performance with or without encryption. The supplied software was disappointing, but there are so many alternatives it really didn't detract much from the purchase. What with upgrading hardware, malware attacks, and simple laptop theft, the investment in this quality backup unit is well worth it.

Love it, easy to install. For Mac is excelent. And cheap price.