Western Digital releases first 2TB portable hard drive  in Egypt

Despite all the talk about the cloud, solid-state drives, and all sorts of other bleeding edge stuff, we all still rely on hard drives. They might not be the hot new thing these days, but that doesn’t mean that incredible technology isn’t going into them. The latest evidence? Western Digital Egypt  has crammed two terabytes of storage into a 2.5-inch portable hard drive.

Western Digital’s latest My Passport USB hard drive will start at 750EGP for a 500GB external drive and go up from there. The offerings include 950EGP for 750GB, 1150EGP for 1TB, 1500EGP for 1.5TB, and finally 1900EGP for the industry’s only 2TB portable.

Thankfully these drives all have USB 3.0 connectivity, so you can access all that storage at a reasonable speed. With USB 3.0′s Super Speed transfers, data will be able to move back and forth at a (theoretical) breakneck pace of 5Gb/s. That’s a big step up from USB 2.0′s meager 480 Mb/s. For example, offloading 2TB at 480Mb/s (much fast than USB 2.0 actually operates, but we’ll use it anyway) would take you about 9 hours and 15 minutes. Going at the real-world sustained speed for USB 3.0 of 100MB/s, will move that full 2TB in 5 hours and 30 minutes. That’s still a long time but, hey, 2TB is a lot of data.

Of course, if you care at all about security you might question why someone would risk walking around with 2TB of data in the first place, but chances are if you have that much stuff it’s mostly music and videos, making this a moot point. WD’s My Passport drives have hardware-based encryption anyway, so with the proper precautions you could be completely fine opting for a 2TB sneakernet data transfer. (Don’t make me take out my data calculator again.)

Interestingly, Western Digital was the first company in Egypt to release a 2TB desktop (3.5-inch) drive as well, but they accomplished that back in 2009. The company didn’t say how they were able to cram 2TB into a 2.5-inch container so it probably had more to do with the engineering than it did any major advances in storage technology.