Western Digital My Passport 2TB Portable Hard Drive Review

WD’s My Passport drive packs a lot of storage into a small enclosure and includes some useful software, to boot. Is it worth its $199 price-tag? Given the absolute lack of competition out there, and also the fact that most 1TB enclosures of this size retail for $200, it absolutely is worth it if you have a need for so much storage while on the go.

As we saw in our performance testing, the My Passport drive, when connected to a USB 3.0 port, performs just like you’d expect any 2.5″ internal drive to. We experienced 100MB/s+ speeds when copying large files over, and about half of that when dealing with thousands of random-sized files, which is typical of hard drive endurance. Performance-wise, we have no complaints.

Though a bit larger than a traditional 2.5″ enclosure, for obvious reasons, the drive will still fit into a bag like it’s not even there, or be kept in a jacket pocket (jeans might be a stretch – no pun). For the most part, the enclosure feels solid, but you can push it in a bit in the middle on either side. This isn’t a big deal, per se, but I’ve felt other enclosures that have felt like tanks. The fact that this one is difficult to open should tell us that the drive is safe and secure on the inside.

The included software with this drive is good, and as it’s available for both the PC and Mac, you’re golden regardless of the OS (as a Linux user, I must sigh). Being able to secure the drive with a password is nice, especially since the software to unlock it is installed on the drive itself – and not to mention you can go back and forth from Mac to PC without skipping a beat.

The backup software is robust, but it does leave a bit to be desired. It frustrates me to no end to fiddle around with a piece of software for five minutes, unable to figure out how to do something that should be simple. The best backup software in the world allows you to specify exactly what folders you want to be monitored and backed-up. WD’s software forces you to guess if what you did actually applies or not. I do hope to see this remedied in the future.

Overall, WD’s latest My Passport is priced as we’d expect, performs as we’d expect, and adds in software that’s works well or works well enough. On top of all that, it’s the only 2TB portable 2.5″ drive on the market, so for those who want such a thing, it’s here for the taking.

Western Digital My Passport 2TB

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