WD introduces first portable dual hard drive with Thunderbolt

My Passport Pro offers up to 4TB RAID storage, fast transfer speeds and maximum portability for creative professionals who need mobility.

WD, a subsidiary of Western Digital, has just launched the new My Passport Pro, the first portable dual hard drive solution powered by Thunderbolt, offering creative professionals and tech lovers the highest performance and capacity in a truly mobile solution. Additionally, My Passport Pro allows you to choose RAID functionality for Mac systems, without the need for additional power adapters or cables, and is available in 2TB and 4TB capacities.

Jim Welsh, executive vice president of WD's global sales and consumer products division, said: "My Passport Pro is the only USB-powered Thunderbolt dual drive solution, providing on-the-go creative professionals with more efficient workflows with fast transfer and protection for the large amounts of digital content they generate outside the studio. From photographers, videographers and musicians to graphic designers and architects, people who depend on portable storage in their daily lives will find it in the new My Passport Pro drive a new level of performance, reliability and, above all, portability.”

“Thunderbolt technology enables new ways to manage content for high-performance workflows,” said Jason Ziller, director of Thunderbolt Marketing at Intel. “By combining dual storage drives into one USB-powered portable device, My Passport Pro becomes a powerful and unique storage solution, with the large storage capacity that users demand today.”

Powered directly via the integrated Thunderbolt cable (designed exclusively for WD), My Passport Pro's performance delivers speeds of up to 233 MB/s, providing ultra-fast transfer, editing and backup capabilities. Another key feature of the My Passport Pro dual-drive drive is its user-selectable RAID feature, which allows users to choose between data striping (RAID 0) for higher performance or mirroring (RAID 1) for data redundancy, depending on their needs. Thunderbolt technology, built into My Passport Pro and superior to FireWire 800 and USB 3.0 interfaces, makes video manipulation very fast and easy, with the ability to copy a 22 GB high-definition video file in half the time normally required by a USB 3.0 drive operating in RAID 0 mode.

Consisting of two 2.5-inch hard drives housed in a slim-line aluminum enclosure, My Passport Pro has been tested for extra durability and reliable performance when working outside the office, traveling and on the move.