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In Portable External Hard 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.

Light Weight Fast USB 3.0 Transfer Rates Inexpensive

Compact. Lots of storage space. Just plugged it in and easy setup. Fair price

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

So far, so good - this little drive has been magic. Hooked it up several times with no issues whatsoever.

Good price Sturdy and attractive case

- Metal body that feels durable - Type C USB 3.0 with option to use USB A - Small profile; it's thinner than the 1TB portable hard drive from another vendor I have - Can be interfaced with hdparm on Linux over USB

USB 3.0 speeds - Relative to USB 2.0 it's MUCH faster! Getting about 80 MB/s write compared to my USB 2.0 flash drives 8 MB/s-ish write speeds. No external power needed Good price (when it's on sale)

-Affordable

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.

Cheap. Quiet. Holds a lot of DATA.