If you need a lot of storage to go, WD’s latest additions could have you covered, as the company hits 6 terabytes in a portable design.
Backing up is definitely important, but if the reason you choose not to has to do with not having a sizeable amount of storage, it may be an excuse you won’t be able to use for much longer.
It’s probably not a valid excuse now — it’s not as if most laptops excess the 2TB mark, let alone the 4TB drives that are easily found — but now there’s an even bigger size of hard drive for folks who need it.
Western Digital has readied a 2.5 inch 6TB drive, which is to say it’s roughly 6000 gigabytes or 6144GB depending on the counting standard you use. Expect a little under that once your operating system is through with it, of course.
The sizeable space is coming to WD’s portable hard drive lines, covering models for video editors in the SanDisk G-Drive ArmorATD and gamers in the WD_Black P10 drives.
Meanwhile, consumers can expect to find it in the 6TB WD My Passport and the 6TB WD My Passport for Mac, seemingly identical versions distinct by how they’re formatted and how much they cost.
Unsurprisingly, the Mac edition is slightly more expensive than the regular PC edition, with the 6TB My Passport retailing for $299 and the Mac edition for $309. Requests to WD as to why the Mac edition would cost $10 more have largely gone unanswered — we asked several times to no avail — but our guess would be this comes down to the Apple tax, whereby you’re paying more because it’s made for an Apple device. Kinda sorta.
Apple computers do use different disk drive formatting from their Windows counterparts, but that shouldn’t invoke a $10 extra, and we’re a little surprised to see this still happening in this day and age. Especially when anyone could just buy the regular version and re-format it for Mac.
WD has some time to get the pricing right, mind you, with the 6TB My Passport drives not expected until October this year.
