BEST SELLERS

In Portable External Hard Drives

Quick transfer speeds, super rugged, and it looks really cool. What's not to like?

They care about design. When you plug the USB cord into the drive, you notice that etched into the orange rubber casing are the words, "design by neil poulton." I think this is more than just a gimmick. The care that they put into the physical product really makes you take better care of it.

I've been able to play games like GTA V, Fallout 4 and XCOM 2 at maximum resolution and others without any lag. The drive itself is 85% full with games.

SUMMARY One of the most cost-efficient per Mb, portable, high-capacity, USB-C powered mechanical drives from the market leader. THE LINE-UP WD has a vast lineup of external hard drives which can sometimes be confusing. I have purchased many of these and still have to go over the various options each time. The “My Passport” series were originally designed to be a certain size (the size of a passport) and have gone through multiple generations. They currently come as “My Passport”, “My Passport for Mac”, “Ultra”, “Ultra for Mac”, “Wireless”, “Wireless SSD”, “SSD”, “Wireless Pro”, and “X”. WD also has a similar, small form factor “Elements” series. The main differentiating feature of the “My Passport Ultra” over the “My Passport” is the USB-C interface with an included cable that can also be set up to be backward compatible to USB-A plugs. The “Ultra” series case has nice heat dissipating shiny metal on top and black plastic on the bottom with tiny rubber feet and an activity LED. I think it looks better than the previous generation metal design. WD tried to be green - using some recycled materials for the case. Everything called “My Passport” has: Option of hardware AES encryption. 3 year warranty Up to 4 TB of storage (though WD doesn’t sell any 2.5 inch 4 TB laptop drives) WD Discovery and WD Backup software SIZE Pretty amazing how something this small can hold 4TB (81.6 x 110 x 20.96 mm). I voided the warranty by taking it apart. One way the case is so small in length is that the USB-C controller is built into the drive. The shock absorption design inside the case is good.The drive inside looks like it likely uses 4 platters and is branded a blue WD drive. Unknown if they had to go SMR or if they still use PMR technology to get this density. The USB-C to USB-C cable has a removable adapter for one end so you can use it for older USB ports. The cable length with adapter is about 20 inches. SOFTWARE I have the “My Passport Ultra”. The root of my drive came with both an “Install Discovery for Windows.exe” and an “Install Discovery for Mac.dmg”. The windows software is designed to easily install and automatically can consolidate data from both online (like Facebook, Google Drive & Dropbox) and local data with the possibility of using AES-256 Encryption. The Encryption software can even add a “return-if-found” message should your drive become lost when travelling. Mine was formatted as NTFS. Natively, this will mount on a Mac as read-only. WD provides a free downloadable version of the Paragon driver that will also let you write to NTFS from macOS - (worth about $20 if you had to buy it yourself). Otherwise, if you wanted to use this on both mac and Win 7+ then you could reformat as exFAT. If you want Mac only then you could re-format as HFS. If you are a mac-only person - buy the “My Passport Ultra for Mac” which has mac software and comes in mac format. PERFORMANCE I don’t believe the drive performance is much of an issue with these mechanical external portables and WD doesn’t even publish specs for them. My testing showed good performance - about 175/165 MB/s R/W attached to a Lenovo P71 laptop with SSD internal drives. Runs cool and quiet.

Easy to setup, quiet, and fast.

Works great. very fast. nice case

The faster USB-C connection works well. I purchased this drive for my Time Machine Backups. It is a faster drive that my other USB SATA drives.

Durable. Light Non Gloss surface so labels stick well. Decent transfer speeds. Comes with A USB C to C cable. As well as A USB C to A cable.

My needs are a little different than most; I use the drive primarily for weekly backups around 200-250GB/week, in very, very large VM .7z archives for the most part. The Toshiba can handle a 100MB/s average write rate when you are copying under Windows 10 with a proper FUNCTIONING USB 3.1 port. (It turns out my previous poor review was due to static-nuked front ports.)

-smooth running and stays cool do to the aluminum cover. -anti skid and stealthy rubber pads. -pretty peppy for a compact 2TB external. connected to a renesis controller via usb 3.0 and backing up 743 GB of compressed music files i saw a high of 57.1MB/s and an average of 47.3 MB/s. i continued to backup the rest of my music files for a total of 1.3 TB (+3/4 capacity) and the transfer speed only dropped slightly to 39.8 MB/s. -3 year warranty.

Fast delivery ,easy to use !

Works well, way quieter than a normal external drive Run pretty cool in temp too

small size, USB3, good price