[Review] WD My Passport Portable External Hard Drive
Most people have an external hard drive these days whether it is for storing media files and documents, or for backing up important files from their personal computer. Western Digital have been one of the leaders in the data storage industry for many years and have refreshed their lineup of My Passport external hard drives with sleeker looking models. Western Digital have kindly sent me a 4TB My Passport external hard drive to test out.
Now firstly I do want to say that the box Western Digital sent the My Passport to me in was pretty nice, which actually foreshadows the not-bad-looking device that’s about to be unboxed. However if you are buying this product off the shelf at a retailer, you won’t be getting this blue box with goodies such as a leather nametag. I was expecting to be able to clip it on to the My Passport but couldn’t find a slot, so I’m assuming it is there as an additional incentive for reviewing this product.
Nevertheless, the usual My Passport box it came in is nice and compact, and can be easily unboxed without too much hassle. Remember these types of packaging? :
My Passport packaging contains the Portable Hard Drive itself, a USB 3.0 cable (drive is USB 2.0 backwards-compatible), WD Backup, WD Security, WD Drive Utilities software as well as a quick start guide. This model of My Passport is formatted to be compatible with Windows systems straight out of the box. For Mac systems you can either get the My Passport formatted for Macs or format the portable hard drive yourself if I’m not mistaken.
I did some read/write tests using Crystal DiskMark and this is what I got doing a speed test 5 times with a 1GB file and a 32GB file, on average:
And in a real world test, I copied just over 20GB of files over to My Passport on a USB 3.0 connection and it averaged around the 105MB/s mark, pretty darn close to the 32GB Speed Test done above using Crystal DiskMark.
The three software that come with the drive are WD Backup, WD Security and WD Drive Utilities. WD Backup lets you define and schedule backup plans to backup selected files in a timely manner; WD Security adds 256-bit AES encryption to My Passport by setting a password to it (which might I add is apparently irretrievable if you forget it); and WD Drive Utilities can do a quick or full scan of My Passport to check for any bad sectors, or to check the SMART status of your drive.
Overall Western Digital’s redesigned lineup of the My Passport products certainly adds a bit of flavour and uniqueness to the portable hard drives. They are portable (can fit in the palm of one’s hand), fast (over 100MB/s on USB 3.0) and secure (can be encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption) and even comes with a 2-year warranty.
For more information please visit: https://www.wdc.com/en-um/products/portable-storage/my-passport.html
