Portable SSDs are not common, but if you value reliability and speed, you can choose one. Here we will show you one solid-state drive, WD My passport SSD, compact and uniquely designed portable SSD. Read this post to learn some information about it.
Western Digital My Passport SSD
My Passport SSD is developed by Western Digital, a US computer hard disk manufacturer and data storage company. It is a compact and uniquely designed portable SSD that can be put on your palm. Here, see the complete review of this hard drive.
1. Design
This SSD has an interesting design approach with two tones including plain black plastic and gunmetal looking ribbed. With this eclectic design, the build quality is quite good and it seems very solid. But it is not easy to clean this SSD since the metal portion picks up smudges all the time.
My Passport SSD is about 3.5 inches long, 1.75 inches wide and mere 0.4 inches thin. And it can fit into your palm and readily into any small pocket of your bad.
Besides, this portable SSD is only about 40g, and even you won’t feel its weight. If you are accustomed to carrying pen drives around, this SSD is just a bit wider.
Western Digital once said that this kind of SSD can bear the shock of a drop of from up to 6.5 feet but it is not waterproof and dustproof, thus, keep it safe from water and dust. To put it simply, WD offers a 3-year limited worldwide warranty.
Western Digital My Passport SSD uses a USB Type-C (USB 3.1) connector and comes with C-to-A adapter for use with older systems. And this eliminates the need to carry any extra cable.
Pre-loaded Software on WD My Passport SSD
On this WD portable SSD, there is much pre-loaded software and you can choose to install or ignore them. Here, let’s see some programs.
WD Drive Utilities helps to check the SSD for errors and format it.
WD Security allows you to set a password to make use of the 256-bit encryption on board. Once the SSD is locked, this program will let the SSD show up on other PCs as a read-only virtual CD with a tiny utility called WD Unlocker. And you are required to type the password to unlock the drive.
WD Backup helps to choose specific folders on the SSD and back up them to Dropbox account at the preferred syncing schedule. But this drive doesn’t support other cloud storage services.
The former two apps are available for both Windows and macOS and WD Backup is only available for Windows.
Performance
My Passport SSD is set to the exFAT file system, thus, it is compatible with any latest Windows PC or a Mac. In the CrystalDiskMark test, its sequential read and write speeds can achieve up to about 450MBps.
When copying about 32GB videos from Surface Pro to the SSD, it takes less than five minutes and only 2 minutes from SSD to the Surface. From this, the speed of this WD portable SSD is quite fast.
Final Words
WD My Passport SSD is available in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB and the price starts at $99.99 in the US. If you are used to the speed or carrying large amounts of data all the time, just get one based on the actual needs.
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Vera is an editor of the MiniTool Team since 2016 who has more than 7 years’ writing experiences in the field of technical articles. Her articles mainly focus on disk & partition management, PC data recovery, video conversion, as well as PC backup & restore, helping users to solve some errors and issues when using their computers. In her spare times, she likes shopping, playing games and reading some articles.