WD My Passport Slim 1TB Portable Hard Drive Review

WD is on a bit of a release binge at the moment, having released its My Passport Ultra just this past summer, and its highly-anticipated 4TB Red NAS hard drives last week. Now, the company has gone ahead and added yet another model to its My Passport line, designed for those who want as slim a drive as possible. It’s appropriately-named: My Passport Slim.

Being slim isn’t the only thing WD’s latest portable drive has going for it, however. It’s also designed to be as durable as they come, with a metal design that proves it. That said – we’re still dealing with mechanical storage here, so the last thing you want to do is be rough with the drive when it’s in operation. A bullet-proof chassis would be no match for a good thud while the internal parts are moving.

WD’s My Passport Ultra 1TB we took a look at last month is in all regards thin itself, but Slim whittles its thickness down to 0.48″, from 0.61″. Likewise, the weight has also naturally been decreased, from 154 grams to 136 grams. If your decision came down to either of these drives, you really couldn’t go wrong with either – but the Slim’s metal casing might be enough to lure you in.

Before we tackle some features of the Slim, let’s take a look at it. In the photo below, you can see it sitting amongst its siblings, the My Passport Ultra 1TB (blue) and My Passport 2TB (black).

In the shot, the Slim drive has a bit of an orange hue to it, but in person it’s purely gray.

Like its Ultra model, WD also includes a small soft fabric pouch with the Slim to tote it around in:

Flipping the drive over, there’s really little to see. However, one thing I find a little unusual is that the Slim model doesn’t have feet like the Ultra does. As inane as it may be, this might have been done to keep the drive as purely thin as possible; it just might not look as thin as it truly is if it had feet. Hmm, that seems a little foolish, doesn’t it?

While WD will offer a 2TB Slim model in time, all that’s available at the moment is the 1TB. When the 2TB gets released, it’ll have a thickness of 0.70″, which compared to the 0.82″ thickness of the regular 2TB My Passport sounds quite good.

As with all 1TB drives, the usable space is 931GB when formatted.

1TB might not seem hugely impressive in 2013, but in this form-factor, it certainly is.

The perks of the Slim drive don’t end with its appearances and durability; WD bundles in a bunch of software to help sweeten the deal. We’re taking a look at that next.