back to article WD gives My Passport spinning rust drives a lick of paint

WD has refeshed the design style of its portable USB 3.0 My Passport, My Passport for Mac and desktop My Book external disk drives, using colours and texture. We guess it has ambitions of competing more strongly with Seagate's designer-influenced LaCie brand. The design was worked on by fuseproject and the descriptive …

  1. Jay 2
    Thumb Down

    It's just storage!

    Reading that rather wanky quote I can almost hear the whalesong from here.

    1. Kurt Meyer
      Pint

      Re: It's just storage!

      @ Jay 2

      "that rather wanky quote"

      Jay, have an upvote and a beer for your magnificent restraint.

      P.S. Don't forget the joss sticks.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Really wonder who buys a portable hard drive based on how it looks....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Personally, I find that design particularly unattractive and, given a choice, would chose something else.

    2. WatAWorld

      Hairdressers and telephone sanitisers.

  3. Darryl

    I feel more empowered by spending less for an external drive in a plain case

    1. Tom Chiverton 1

      But think of the bundled software ! Experience the joy of being part of a giant world wide botnet ...

  4. sjsmoto
    Joke

    What, no "Hey Rusty!" voice command system and 3-D goggles? How disappointing for the kids.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    These drives should be banned..

    .. and any designer who dares suggesting that those devices should be presented in the most unstable position possible (on their edge) should be permanently put on the airport list for "rectal exam by people with really thick fingers" list for the rest of their lives.

    Has nobody ever heard of a head crash? When these drives have spun up, the heads are no longer parked but hover very closely to the data, data that is so high in volume that most end users will not have it replicated on a spare drive (also because USB 3 may be fast, but 4TB is quite a lot to clone). Placing a drive housing on its edge makes it possible for the drive to fall over. When it is powered up when that happens you run quite a high risk of losing the drive contents.

    Sure, the drives can take several Gs of deceleration, but only when powered OFF. When they're live they are a *lot* less tolerant - when it's live, falling over is almost guaranteed to screw it up through a head crash.

    Just lie these things flat - stable. If anyone in your design team suggest they may look prettier standing up, make them fall over and see if they like it. Repeatedly. Until they get the point.

    End users have enough problems already without idiot designers luring them into bad ideas for mass storage. End this idiocy today.

    /rant

    1. Jim Mitchell

      Re: These drives should be banned..

      Perhaps they have sensors to detect falling over and/or down?

      1. WatAWorld

        Re: These drives should be banned..

        If they do then those sensors they would be one of the main selling points. There is nothing in the specs or sales literature to indicate that they do, so the sensible thing is to assume they don't.

        https://www.wdc.com/products/portable-storage/my-passport.html

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: These drives should be banned..

        Perhaps they have sensors to detect falling over and/or down?

        Practical experience suggests not. Modern drives can be spun up in almost any position (although some are not recommended), but once they are spinning, changing that positioning comes with disastrous consequences, especially when you do it fast.

  6. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Meh

    I preferred the way they looked before.

    Rather annoying because the a new one will stick out like a sore thumb.

  7. David Nash Silver badge

    If they didn't have to pay for that marketing nonsense the price might be half as much.

    Oops no silly me, the profits would be twice as much.

  8. choleric

    AES256

    Obviously not for the discerning security-minded consumer then.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: AES256

      This security minded consumer slicked the drive and uses Veracrypt and EDS (for the Android side).

  9. Bob Merkin
    Stop

    Yves Behar would look

    mighty silly with one of those drives sticking out of his pie-hole.

    1. Fungus Bob

      Re: Yves Behar would look

      He'd look even sillier with one of those drives sticking out of a different hole...

  10. Crazy Operations Guy

    Have they fixed the connector issue?

    I have one of the older versions (1TB, USB 2.0 two-tone black/silver metal case), its been reliable so far, but I never use it voluntarily. The problem is that while the connector is Micro-USB, it is recessed enough that a regular cable won't fit, only the one that came with it. I've even tried whittling standard USB cables to fit, but I had to remove too much plastic that the connector falls apart.

    I only bought it because I was traveling and my laptop's disk started throwing errors so I needed something to back up to just-in-case. It was the only thing at the local electronics shop that was big enough to accommodate my files.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Anyone else have bricked WD Passports...????

    Bought several WD Passports for family / friends, but they all died most just outside warranty. Lots of red faces from lost holiday photos etc. Won't repeat that mistake again...

    1. WatAWorld

      Re: Anyone else have bricked WD Passports...????

      Now there is "news we can use". Like with the previously mentioned awkward sub-standard USB socket placement. Those are technical points that are relevant to purchasing decisions. Color is not.

  12. WatAWorld

    Help Desk: Q: What kind of disk drive do you have? A: Blue

    It sounds like one of those blond jokes half my family hates.

    LaCie? You don't have to compete with LaCie because LaCie portable drives have SeaGate drives inside. No technically competent and experienced person will rely on a Seagate drive, they are only reliable enough in redundant arrays.

    Excuse me sir, what color of computer are you looking for? Oh, yes, and what color mouse?

    (That said, I wish power cables weren't all black, having different dark colors would make sorting through my surge protectors at home easier.)

    What techies want to hear about on portable disk drives is shock protection, durability, physical size, capacity, price and *warrantee*.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Help Desk: Q: What kind of disk drive do you have? A: Blue

      LaCie? You don't have to compete with LaCie because LaCie portable drives have SeaGate drives inside. No technically competent and experienced person will rely on a Seagate drive, they are only reliable enough in redundant arrays.

      Hmm, not my experience, but maybe I got the one exception by assembling it myself. I stuck a 1T Seagate hybrid drive in a USB3 case and that's in use as a bare metal backup. Not only does a backup take substantially less time, but its speed also allows it to act as a reasonable boot drive if the internal SSD would blow up (and yes, I test this backup frequently as I was nervous about the flash cache). It was worth the effort IMHO.

    2. Fatman

      Re: Help Desk: Q: What kind of disk drive do you have? A: Blue

      <quote>(That said, I wish power cables weren't all black, having different dark colors would make sorting through my surge protectors at home easier.)</quote>

      Then I guess that you have never heard of ty-wraps or colored electrical tape?

  13. cloth

    Don't touch them with a barge pole if....

    I've got a WD duo drive and I'm getting rid of it. Regardless of whether you asked it to or not they encrypt the drives using hardware in the enclosure. if the enclosure dies - you've pretty much lost your data !! The "passwd encryption option" merely encrypts the passwd - the data is already encrypted regardless of whether you set it or not.

    At least - that's what I have found out from the forums e.g. https://community.wd.com/t/wd-my-book-duo-data-forever-lost-if-drive-enclosure-dies/6496/23

    and, as WD seemed to not take this on-board, I'm outta here - they can keep it.

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