Reformatting & Setup Process for Western Digital My Passport Portable Hard Drive. $2,000 Custom PC vs $4,000 Mac Pro - Duration. Western Digital (WD) My Passport Wireless Review - Duration. The WD elements is about $10 more expensive compared to the WD passport ultra. Measuring significance for correlations using excel 2011 mac. I'm just worried the WD passport ultra software is going to be a pain to work with on a macbook. (Yes the $12 difference after taxes matters to me because I'm going to buy several of these as Christmas gifts).

My Passport Ultra was previously used on my Windows 7 PC. I have since reformatted it on my PC just to get all the info off of it. I want to format it to work on my Macbook Pro for Time Machine, so I looked into how to do that. It told me to open the Disk Utility, and to choose the drive and then choose 'Erase'. However, the 'Erase' button is greyed out and it will not let me erase it. Again, the drive has already been formatted on my PC, so it is blank. Is there maybe a way to format it for a Mac on my PC??

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Helpful software The new My Passport Ultra is preloaded with WD Backup, WD Security, WD Utilities applications. You don't need to install any of these to use the drive but they adds a lot more value to the drive, especially for Windows users.

The WD Backup software, available only for Windows, is the replacement of the WD SmartWare, normally bundled with previous portable drives from WD. WD Backup is now much more simple to use. It allows you to pick what files and folders on the local drive that you want to backup (by default the data of the current user's profile is select), after that it will automatically perform the backup every hour, everyday or every month. Unfortunately, you can't change the backup frequency any further and there's no longer the option to backup each time you make changes to the computer. You can't backup the entire system, either, to restore in case you need to replace the hard drive of the computer.

WD Backup does allow for backing up data onto a Dropbox account (not included), however. WD Drive Utilities (Windows and Mac) includes utilities that enable you to check on the drive's status, test its functionality, or even reformat it. WD Security (Windows and Mac) lets you secure the drive's content with a password.

The drive supports strong 256-AES hardware encryption, and once you've picked a password, the content is completely inaccessible if that password is forgotten. Both WD Drive Utilities and WD Security are available for both Windows and Mac. The optional Grip Packs add even more colors to the drive. Josh Miller/CNET More colors with WD Grip packs With the new Ultra, for the first time WD introduces the Grip Pack. The pack is available in five additional colors including smoke, slate, grape, sky and fuchsia. Each pack include a band and a color matching 18' USB 3.0 cable.

The band is designed to encircle the Ultra drive to offer better grip, a bit of protection against drops, and of course, more color options. Each Grip Pack is slated to cost around $13 and you can mix and match the packs and the drive to create up to 24 color options. Performance The new My Passport Ultra it performed well in my testing. Via USB 3.0, it registered the sustained copy speed of 110MBps for writing and 117MBps for reading. Interestingly, these were slightly slower than the performance of the original My Passport Ultra that came out two years ago. However, the difference is within the margin of error.