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I'm very pleased to now be the proud owner of 2 My Passport ext. hard drives by Western Digital. I'm using them in tandem for backup, taking one to my bank's storage vault every other week. They're quick, reliable & seemingly fail-safe.

-Very good looking - Pleasant to the touch rubbed surface - Good sturdy reliable cable connection (very rare among USB HDDs) - All-in-all very quality product impression - Very good tough thick nice looking retail box.

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.)

-Portable -Great memory size -Easily connected to PS5

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.

My grandson loves this external hard drive. He uses it to house all his video games. It was affordable and worth the money.

Good price, sent it to a friend, thanks!

Seems to be built really well. So far so good. Looks pretty good.

Simple, works right out of the box. I now have a new Time Machine disk for my laptop.