In this WD My Passport Ultra Review, all the things about this drive are discussed honestly.
A WD My Passport formatted with the Windows file system will be useless on the Mac and vice-versa. But, the good news is that MS-DOS exFAT and FAT32 formats come quite in handy in such cases. These file systems can help you to make your WD My Passport work with a Windows PC and Mac at the same time.
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.
Your My Passport Edge for Mac drive and the WD Security and WD Drive Utilities software are compatible with the following operating systems: Compatibility can vary, depending on hardware configuration and operating system. MY PASSPORT EDGE FOR MAC USER MANUAL ABOUT YOUR WD DRIVE – 3 For highest performance and reliability, al ways install the latest updates and service pack (SP). On Mac computers, go to the Applemenu and select Software Update. On Windows computers, go to the Start menu and select Windows Update. Home / Mac External Drive Advice / Easily Use Your WD My Passport For Mac And Windows in 7 Steps By Simon Irons September 6, 2019 October 20, 2019 You have a WD My Passport portable external drive and you want to make it work on both Mac and PC.
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.
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.
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. Then leave it on the software.
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.
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Contents
Easiest Way to Fix WD Passport Not Showing Error
Follow to learn how to make your WD Passport external hard drive detected again:
'I have a WD My Passport Ultra 1TB portable drive for storing movies, photos, and important personal files. This morning, WD My Passport suddenly became inaccessible, couldn't be detected by my computer.
The WD Passport ultra is not showing up on my PC and I couldn't access saved data either. Is there a possible way that can help me to repair the not detectable WD drive to work again?'
If you are having a similar problem on your WD My Passport Ultra hard drive or other brands of external hard drive or devices, don't worry.
On this page, you'll learn why is WD Passport Ultra external hard drive not showing up on Windows PC and how to fix this error on your own with practical fixes and tutorials.
There is a lot of reasons that will cause your external hard drive not showing up or not detected on Windows PC. Check the following list, you may find the exact cause that makes your WD Passport Ultra external not recognized error:
So how to fix these errors and make your WD Passport Ultra external hard drive show up on PC again? Check the fixes and follow tutorials below to get rid of this issue immediately.
5 Fixes to Remove WD Not Showing Up/Not Detected Error:
When your computer cannot detect or read your WD hard drive, you can first try to change the USB cable and connect it with another USB port or new PC to see if the drive can be read or not.
Step 1. Switch a USB port/cable and replug it to your computer.
If the drive can be read via new a USB cable or on a new PC, then the drive is working fine. The problem exists on the USB cable.
Step 2. Reconnect the WD drive via a new USB hub or to a new computer.
You can selectively follow below 4 methods to get problems fixed and repair the WD My Passport drive to show up and work again.
When your WD become inaccessible, you can follow the guidelines below to change its drive letter so as to make WD passport detectable and accessible again in Windows PC: Open tar mac.
Step 1. Press Win + R to bring up Run dialog > Type: diskmgmt.msc to open Disk Management.
Step 2. Right-click on WD drive which fails to show up and choose 'Change Drive Letter and Paths.'.
Step 3. Click 'Add' and choose the drive letter beside Assign the following drive letter > Click 'OK'.
If WD drive has already assigned with a letter, click 'Change' to choose another letter for it.
Step 4. Then restart PC and you can check out whether the problem still exists or not.
If the system files corrupted or the WD device contains bad sectors, you won't be able to access the drive. Your computer may not even able to detect it from File Explorer.
EaseUS partition manager software with its Check File System feature supports repairing corrupted file system and bad sectors on WD hard drive. Download it, you can easily make your WD external hard drive show up on the computer again.
Follow to see how to fix corrupted system files and bad sectors on WD device:
Step 1: Open EaseUS Partition Master on your computer. Then locate the disk, right-click the partition you want to check, and choose 'Check File System'.
Step 2: In the Check File System window, keep the 'Try to fix errors if found' option selected and click 'Start'.
Step 3: The software will begin checking your partition file system on your disk. When it has completed, click 'Finish'.
When the WD Passport drive is not working, it's highly possible that the device driver is not updated. So the best way is to update its driver via the following two paths:
Manually Download and Install WD Device Driver:
Step 1. Right-click on the Windows icon at the left corner and select Device Manager.
Step 2. Find and expand Disk Drivers, Portable Devices, Universal Serial USB Controllers or Other devices to see if WD device is shown as Unknown device.
Step 3. Right-click on Unknown device > select Properties.
Step 4. Go to Details tab > Set Property to be Hardware Ids.
Step 5. Right-click the top Value and click Copy.
Step 6. Paste what you copy into a browser to search the correct device driver, find and download the correct WD device driver and install it on your PC.
Step 7. Then restart your computer and everything shall work fine with your WD My Passport Ultra drive.
Update WD Device Driver from Device Manager:
Step 1. Right-click on the Windows icon and select Device Manager.
Step 2. Expand Device Manager and right-click the WD My Passport Ultra drive. How to screen grab on a macbook.
Step 3. Select 'Update driver'.
Step 4. Select 'Search automatically for updated driver software', wait for the process to complete.
When the Universal USB Bus Controllers is outdated, it may also stop your WD passport from being detected or showing up. So the last efficient way that you can try is to uninstall and reinstall USB controllers:
Step 1. Right-click on the Windows icon and select 'Device Manager'.
Step 2. Find and expand Universal Serial Bus controllers > Right-click on USB controllers on your WD drive and select 'Uninstall device'.
Repeat to uninstall each USB controller one by one.
Step 3. Apple support drivers. Restart the computer and Microsoft will automatically reinstall the USB controllers software for your WD drive.
After this, you shall be able to visit and access saved data on your WD Passport Ultra drive normally by then.
If your WD hard drive shows up and can be detected normally again, please don't rush to use it. Please do these tips first:
If the WD hard drive still doesn't show up or cannot be detected, some physical errors may have occurred to your device. Please try these tips for a guide:
On this page, we explained why is WD My Passport Ultra external hard drive not showing up on Windows PC and provided 5 practical fixes for you to follow and make the drive show up again.
If you are having a similar issue on other brands of external hard drive, internal hard drive, USB, or SD card, you can also try these tips to make your device show up and work again on Windows PC.
For further issues related to the WD passport, check the questions and answers below. You'll get a satisfying answer:
1. WD My Passport not showing up on Mac
If you are having a similar issue that WD My Passport external or internal hard drive not showing up on Mac, you can try the following tips as listed here for help: (Some are similar as shown on this page)
2. How to use WD Passport on Windows 10?
For a new WD Passport: Connect Passport to Windows 10 PC > Open Disk Management and Initialize Disk > Create a New Partition on WD Passport drive.
For a used WD Passport: Connect it to Windows 10 > Open it in File Explorer to use it. If you need more space, delete some useless files on it to free up space.
3. Why is my external hard drive not showing up?
Accordingly, there are many reasons that may cause your external hard drive not showing up. Here is a list of major reasons:
For a resolution, follow to External/Internal Hard Drive Is Not Showing Up in Windows 10/8/7.