Western Digital has along since a mainstay for portable hard drives with its popular My Passport line, but its recently started to shift its focus to solid-state drives — and now the company is launching its second-generation My Passport SSD lineup, which brings even faster speeds than the original.
The new My Passport SSDs borrow from the overall design language from the current hard drive models, but replace the angular corners and waves with a more rounded design to tell the two lines apart. The idea is that the hard drive lineup — with its larger capacities of up to 5TBs on a single device — will serve customers looking for sheer storage, while the new SSDs will offer better speed and durability.
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Speed is the name of the game here: the new drive supports the USB-C 3.2 Gen-2 standard, and promises up to 1050MB/s read speeds and up to 1000MB/s write (roughly twice as fast as the original 2018 My Passport SSD). The new drives also offer a five year warranty, and will come in gray, red, blue, and gold colors.
To start, Western Digital will be launching a 500GB option for $119.99 and a 1TB model for $189.99 (both in gray) starting today, although more colors and a larger 2TB capacity drive are planned for release later this year.
