Western Digital is well known as one of the best hard drive makers in the world. Western Digital purchased flash memory manufacturer SanDisk about one year ago, and yeaterday announced the launch of its first portable SSD – My Passport Ssd, a couple of months after unveiling a desktop solid state drive.

The new My Passport SSD is aimed at hardware enthusiasts who need portable media with high performance, offering up to 515MB/sec sequential read and write speeds, which is by far the fastest among all portable drives Western Digital made to date. Also, it features integrated 256-bit AES hardware encryption and it comes with a limited three-year warranty.

The My Passport SSD is designed for USB 3.1 Type-C ports which are theoretically capable of transfering data at a maximum rate of 10Gbps and it can be used with compatible computers, but it ships with both a USB-C to USB-C cable and a USB-A adapter too.

The My Passport SSD is available in three sizes: 1TB, 512GB, and 256GB. All three models are more expensive than a portable hard drive, e.g. a 2TB My Passport drive with a mechanical disk drive costs $79.99, while My Passport SSD with 1 TB of disk space costs $399.99 and is available now, the 512GB model costs $199.99 but it is out of stock and the 256GB version of My Passport SSD costs $99.99 and is available now.