WD My Passport are high capacity portable hard drives available in six colors and up to four TB. The drives are sleek and portable and can store tons of pictures, videos, music or any other document or files you want. This is my review of WD My Passport portable hard drive with 3 TB storage capacity with red color.
Design and Build
The drive is blocky with no curves just edges on every side of the drive. The drive looks like a small Xbox One, half part of the drive ha glossy finish over it and other half has matte finish. The encasing is made of hard plastic which looks sturdy and (possibly) adds some weight to the drive. On top, there is WD branding with engraved WD logo on the shiny side and matte side is empty with some wide, slanted groovy lines running across. Edges of the drive are empty except the one with the USB 3.0 port and the status LED.
Below the drive, there is some information about the drive with “My Passport” branding and four rubber feet to keep the drive steady on the table while it’s connected. The drive comes packed in a cardboard box including a USB 3.0 to USB Type-A cable, a “Hello” card and an instruction manual.
Features
WD My Passport comes with features like securing your drive with a password and creating a backup and restore them from the WD Backup utility.
WD Security
WD Security secures the drive with a password you choose. You need to install the software on a PC to setup a password. Once set, the drive won’t show up until you enter the right password. Unlocking the drive is a tricky thing to do because nothing will pop up when you connect the drive.
You need to open the WD Unlocker drive in file explorer and run the “WD Drive Unlock.exe” and fill the password.
WD should work on this a little and make it slightly more simple so one can connect the drive to PC and unlocks it right away without doing so much.
WD Backup
You know 3 TB is enough storage to backup your whole PC and WD Backup software will do it for you. You can create backup plans for routine backup to keep the track and backup the whole PC in case you see the blue screen of death. WD Backup comes with a simple tabbed interface with separate Backup and Restore tabs.
WD Drive Utilities
WD Drive Utilities is packed with some options to tweak the settings of the drive. You can diagnose your drive or do a full drive test to keep the drive healthy and find out about the errors. Set sleep timer for the drive, this shuts down the mechanical drive if left idle to save the power of your laptop to which it’s connected. You could erase your whole drive using this utility if you lost the password.
Performance
I used the drive for everyday data transfer tasks and found the drive functioning well, and data transfer rate is fast enough. We have done some benchmarking for this drive to get some accurate numbers. First, with the CrystalDiskMark then HD Tach and we gain some satisfactory results for read and write speeds. CrystalDiskMark done some read/write tests and 4K test, the average speed we got are 133.5 MB/s and 127.6 MB/s. Check other results with HD Tach below.
The results on both the benchmarking tools are about the same and on HD Tach burst speed is 289.5MB/s which is amazing and better than few of the internal hard drives.
Verdict
WD My Passport did great in our testing and results are best what you can find in a portable hard drive. Apart from data transfer speed, WD provides some utilities for backup the drive, and the best of them is the security feature to secure your precious data (for me it’s games, lots of them). WD My Passport is the best portable hard drive for you if you travel a lot with your 4K camera and a laptop with low storage.
