Western Digital My Passport for Mac 500GB Portable Hard Drive

Pros: Very small compared to other 500GB externals I have owned: 4.35" x 3.23" x 0.6"
Very lightweight: 0.3 lbs
Nice looking finish and color scheme.
Has a thick softer plastic around the sides and bottom for protection.

Has good transfer speeds for it's class:
two 4+GB files averaged around 30MB/s transfer rate
five 200+MB files: 26MB/s
one hundred 100+KB files: 4MB/s

Is perfect for transferring/storing media or lots of other medium sized files.

Cons: Seems to be easily crushed. Squeezed between my fingers lightly and you can feel the casing pressing in a little too far.

VERY short USB2.0 cable included, only 18". Does not even reach my front USB ports from my desk.

Other Thoughts: Well worth the price for it's size and capacity. I would recommend if you need something very portable where capacity and speed aren't a huge factor.

Is "for MAC" so comes with MAC file system disk format.
Easily used with Windows. Install HFS for Windows drivers and you are ready to go. Also can format to NTFS or exFAT for other good options.

I really like the look and size of the My Passport for MAC. Never was concerned about the aesthetics of this type of hardware but people will comment on how "cool" it looks.
Someone asked me they could get an iPhone case like this. Showed them it was a USB dive and they went home and ordered themselves one!

Pros: It's WD, which is a pretty good company for hard drives. The outer casing also looks pretty stylish, and is somewhat durable.

Cons: The cable can be a bit on the short side, depending on how you want to use it. It does seem to be using micro-USB however, so it may be possible to use a longer cable if you happen to have another one around.

I'm also not that big of a fan of WD's SES thing. While it might be a nice addition to the drive, I do wish there was a way to disable it altogether, especially if you're just using the drive as simple backup.

Other Thoughts: This drive was confirmed working on Windows XP, 8, Ubuntu 12.10, and Android 4.1.2 (Nexus 7).

This drive also makes a very stylish and awesome companion to a Nexus 7, both due to the drive's portable nature, and the color scheme is pretty similar.

Also this won't work out-of-the-box with Windows, due to the drive's formatting being non-Windows standard. It will work with Mac OS X, and most likely Linux. You can easily repartition the drive though for most (recent) Operating Systems, by using MBR Partition Scheme with NTFS.

Pros: Attractive styling with brushed aluminum top and black plastic bottom. Worked immediately out of the box. Packaging was well executed, with no need to fight through tough plastic to get the drive or accessories out. Drive runs cool. Not ultra sensitive to movement of the USB connection at the drive side like many other external drives I have run across. Small rubberized feet on the bottom of the enclosure. Comes with tools installed onto the drive for checking SMART status, secure erase, and integrity testing, among others. There is also a very nice tool for setting a password for hardware based 256 bit AES encryption should your drive be stolen. This drive works seamlessly with Time Machine. Requires no separate power adapter, works fine on USB bus power only. Drive may be re-partitioned with NTFS and formatted to be used in a Windows environment. Enclosure feels durable, but don’t expect it to protect the drive from a good drop!

Cons: Short cable...incredibly short. Not suitable for desktop use unless you have a hub handy or you buy a longer cable. No eggs off since it is not advertised as a desktop solution. USB 2.0 only, but no eggs off for that since the drive has no hope of saturating the USB 2.0 interface anyway which is 48 MB/s max. Slow sequential read and write speeds. Low platter density and slow 5400 RPM rotational speed account for the sub-par performance. One is usually not a total performance killer, but both will murder you. Short 2 year warranty, but that is not unique to Western Digital. Does not come with a protective carry bag or case (mesh/nylon/rubber/whatever) yet this drive is aimed squarely at mobile users/road warriors and those people are the most likely to drop the drive, especially during retrieval from a laptop bag. This last item is what got one egg subtracted. If Western Digital had positioned this drive as anything performance related I would have subtracted yet another star.

Other Thoughts: The testing environment is a MacBook Pro 8, running Lion 10.7.4. XBench 1.3 was used for benchmarking. I included the internal Hitachi 500 GB drive in the benchmark results just to demonstrate how slow this external hard disk is.

First up for benchmarks is the Western Digital My Passport for MAC, 500GB. All speeds given are for UNBUFFERED SEQUENTIAL transfers and are rounded to the next nearest MB. The drive had no data on it, save for the utilities provided.

Read:

4K file transfer size.........7 MB/s
256K file transfer size....34 MB/s

Write:

4K file transfer size........28 MB/s
256K file transfer size.....22 MB/s

Now, for the internal Hitachi 500GB hard disk on a SATA interface. All speeds given are for UNBUFFERED SEQUENTIAL transfers and are rounded to the next nearest MB. The drive is about 20% full at this point, so it already starts out with a handicap.

Read:


4K file transfer size........20 MB/s
256K file transfer size.....79 MB/s


Write:


4K file transfer size........92 MB/s
256K file transfer size.....73 MB/s

I will wrap up this review by stating that ALL manufacturers that are making, or are considering making a portable USB hard disk solution need to make three changes before I personally will give them a five star review:

1. Longer USB cables...36” is ideal but 24” would be acceptable.
2. Carrying pouches/bags for the product.
3. Higher rotational speed AS STANDARD. 7200 RPM notebook hard disks do not require much more (if any) power than a 5400 RPM notebook hard disk. This becomes critical in the case of lower platter density drives to fill in a certain market segment (500GB vs 1TB for example); the performance will suffer far less.

Pros: I was a tech since mid 90’s, so I know my way around a bit. I personally use these little hard drives to backup my audiobook collection, documents and photos. Maybe an occasional file transport to a friend. Like all 2.5” hard drive enclosures, they only use 1 cable which is oh so nice compared to how it used to be with power bricks and the like.

The 500GB hard drive comes with formatted for OSX, you can format it for PC as well.

I’m not much of a fan of synthetic benchmarks with fake data files, so all is real world data to (read) and from (write) my ultra fast RAM drive (no bottlenecks) plugged into a USB 3.0 port (though this drive is only USB 2.0) with ala stopwatch. Latest version of 10.8 was used. May be be millisecond ultra accurate, but it’s real world accurate. You’re not going to be running operating systems, running complex apps, or worried about latency or IOPS. You’re going to be doing 2 things: reading and writing. That’s it. So here are real world speeds for a few gigs of tiny (html, less than 1MB), medium (compressed data like JPG photos from digital camera or MP3s) and large files (e.g. HD movie).

USB 2.0:
1. Large file (1 @ 4.00 GB)
Write: 1:54 - 35.1MB/sec
Read: 1:49 - 37.0MB/sec

2. Average files (1,184 @ 5.18GB)
Write: 3:22 @ 25.6MB/sec
Read: 3:21 @ 25.8MB/sec

3. Tiny files (36,686 @ 458MB)
Write: 3:13 @ 2.51 MB/sec
Read: 2:58 @ 2.27 MB/sec

Cons: Physically, the plastic cover feels a bit cheap, but looks okay. Not Mac sessy, but it’s okay. It’s very light and feels cheaper though.

Other Thoughts: All in all this is a solid little hard drive, faster than the seagates for larger files. About the same for average files. And MUCH slower (50% slower) for tiny files. I don’t know what pricing is now, but I’d certain go check the USB 3.0 drives out, you may be able to get a faster external drive for the same price and just format it for MAC. That’s what I’d do, you’d save yourself the Apple tax premium. Two year warranty a little better than minimum (vs 1 yr), but don’t get me started on the fake hard drive shortage, the wink and the nod between this new duopoly of Seagate and WD colluding to keep prices high and warranties short. <Sigh> Topic for another day. Anyways, hope this helps you decide if this HDD will work for you.

Manufacturer Response:

We appreciate your feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced with the My Passport for Mac, as this is not the typical experience with the product. The enclosure on the drive is plastic, which is convenient to keep the drive cool to touch and for its unique sleek design. We have other models that have different enclosures and interfaces. For more information, please see the link bellow:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/external/portableformac/
We would appreciate the opportunity to further assist you, and resolve any further concerns you may have with the device and/or your experience. You may contact us at 1 (800) 275-4932, or via our support website at: http://support.wdc.com/rs/. Please indicate within the online case creation or with the first support agent you speak with, that you are responding to a Newegg review, so we route you and your information to the correct team members.