WD 2TB My Passport portable external storage, external hard drive, USB 3.0, portable HDD with software for device management, backup and password protection, works with PC, Xbox &Playstation, Black

This review is for the My Passport 2 TB standard version (not Ultra) - I just got this drive yesterday, and I'm a bit wary of writing such a positive review so early on, but I know if I don't do it now then I never will and I'll forget all the details. I'll definitely update it if I do start to have any problems with it later though. Be warned - this review might be very long, but there don't seem to be that many reviews of this particular model so I'd like to cover everything that would have been useful to me in case any of it helps anyone else. The reason I went for this particular drive is that I needed a portable drive of at least 2 TB, but wanted it to be as small and light as possible, so while 4 TB would have been nice, those seem quite a bit bigger and heavier and the reviews for them seem worse in terms of both performance and reliability, so decided to stick with 2 TB. All the drives I could find to have plenty of reports of them failing etc in the reviews, but the WD ones *seemed* to have less, and I get the impression that most knowledgeable people on other forums etc with experience of different drives tend to favour WD for reliability over other manufacturers these days. I almost went for the Ultra version, as my new laptop has USB-C and it does seem nicer than the extra-wide MicroUSB 3 connector, but I didn't particularly want it to be made of metal (it's just extra weight for me), and my laptop's USB-C ports are usually taken up by the charger and a hub anyway. Plus lots of reviews say the USB-C cable that comes with it is really bad, and I didn't like the choice of colours. So when I realised the standard version was £20 cheaper, available in black, and doesn't seem to have any real drawbacks apart from the wider connector (maybe the performance is slightly worse, but I'm not sure because that's not really mentioned anywhere) I decided to go for that one instead. Amazon's packaging of it wasn't great - I saw other reviews saying to order other items at the same time as a hard drive so that they get packed around it in the box, so I did, but unfortunately that didn't help because the packaging consisted of one small strip of the large air bubble type stuff placed on top of all the items, which left literally half the outer box empty for everything slide around in. Just picking up the box after it was delivered, everything loudly slid over and thudded into the other side of the box. It seems to have survived ok though (and of course it was in its own retail box which I would hope provided some protection). From looking into it I've found people saying that hard drives these days can survive huge forces as long as they're not turned on at the time, so anything that was enough to damage it in transit would have caused visible damage to the casing too (in this case even the cardboard retail box it was in doesn't have any signs of damage), and that it would be likely to not work properly at all straight away rather than just failing later. So I think it's fine. I currently have two similar-style drives - an older WD My Passport (Essential SE, apparently) 1 TB from sometime around 2010 which has a MicroUSB 2 connector, and a slightly newer Samsung M3 1 TB with MicroUSB 3 (same as this drive), so it's interesting to see how this compares to those. The first thing I noticed when unboxing it was that it is considerably smaller than either of those (about half the height, despite having double the capacity), and also noticeably lighter. So I am impressed and pleased with that - it looks very sleek, and the casing feels solid, so definitely no complaints about the plastic of the drive itself from me. When plugged in and spinning, it is slightly noisier than my Samsung M3, but still pleasantly quiet (no noticeable seeking noises at all so far, just the constant spin). And this is with a Razer Blade Stealth (late 2019) laptop which is almost completely silent when not doing much, and the drive in front of it at the moment, so I probably wouldn't be able to hear it at all if I wasn't in such a quiet environment. The cable that came with it seems to be working fine so far, but possibly is of similar bad quality to the USB-C version - it is quite stiff, possibly a bit wobbly when connected in the ports on both ends (although no loss of connection so far even when moving it) and is noticeably thinner than the cable (of the same type) that came with my Samsung M3 drive. So I might still get a better cable at some point, at least if/when this one starts to have any connection issues. In terms of performance (which I'm surprised isn't mentioned at all in the product details/marketing etc, other than I think I saw the USB 3.0 maximum speed of 5Gbit/s mentioned somewhere which is obviously ridiculous as the drive won't be capable of anywhere near that), I'm getting maximum read/write speeds of 126/116 MB/s in ATTO Disk Benchmark, and sequential read/write speeds of 138/116 MB/s in CrystalDiskMark (just as it came, with NTFS formatting and nothing on it yet). My Samsung M3 (which I remember performance being a point of when I bought it, although I hadn't been able to make full use of that until recently as my old laptop only had USB 2) seems to be maxing out at about 85 MB/s for both read and write (although with a lot more data on it, if that makes any difference), so I'm pleased with this. One issue I have with my old My Passport drive is that it always seems to spin down (to a lower speed if not completely off, I'm not sure) about 20 seconds after it was last accessed, and then takes about 5 seconds to get going when something tries to access it again, which can get very frustrating. I've tried increasing/turning off the sleep timer in both WD Drive Utilities and the Windows Power Management "Turn off hard disk after" setting, but neither makes any difference, it seems to have its own fixed internal idle timer for some sort of low-power mode which even WD's own software can't change. Thankfully that doesn't seem to be an issue with this new drive. I've tried enabling the encryption on this drive to see if it makes any difference to performance - it doesn't, but as the "encryption" process is so basic (it's basically just setting a password on the drive in the "WD Security" software, and it seems to take effect immediately), I'm guessing the drive is actually encrypted at the hardware level all the time (as otherwise it would surely take time to encrypt/decrypt the existing data when setting/unsetting the password). So I'd say that's a drawback as it means even if you don't use the drive encryption, if the controller fails but not the drive itself, you can't take out the actual drive and connect it up to something else, but on the other hand you apparently can't do that with these particular WD drives anyway as the controller board is soldered directly to the drive rather than it using standard SATA connectors or anything. I'm not sure how the password system would work if you connect it to other devices such as phones/tablets etc (on Windows, the drive having a password set causes it to appear as a CD drive with an executable file on it which you run and enter the password into, which then causes the actual hard drive to show up as well), but if I wanted the drive encrypted I don't think I'd rely on this as a solution anyway as WD's system apparently has a lot of vulnerabilities. I also tried enabling write caching for the drive in Windows (before trying the encryption), but it seemed to make barely any difference at all (write speeds very slightly higher, read speeds possibly actually lower, but probably all within the margin of error anyway) so I'm going to leave that off as it's not worth the extra risk if the drive gets disconnected by accident (especially if the cable does become dodgy). I think that just about covers everything I've thought of so far, so I hope someone finds it useful :)

Probably one of the best ones out there. I purchased a 2TB one. It is slim, lightweight, with an elegant design. On UBS 3 it achieved a a write speed of 100Mb/sec. One of my main reasons for buying this one was the Password security it offers for my personal files. So while there may be other good ones out there such as Toshiba or Seagate, few offer password protection like WD does (and then at such a brilliant price) I have two computers. One has Windows 7 the other Windows 10. The Windows 7 computer WOULD NOT download the security et.al. programmes beyond 18% using the WD Discovery provided with this HDD. However it did already have an older version of the security/partition etc. programmes from a few years ago. The new WD Discovery worked fine on Windows 10. I found that the password I installed on the Window 10 computer then worked well with the older already installed Discovery on the Windows 7 computer. Essentially what I am saying is that the Security et. al software will only download with Windows 10 using the Discovery Downloader (Orange icon) provided with this product. It will not download on a Windows 7 platform . However once a Password has been installed on the HDD through Windows 10 then this will also work on a Windows 7 computer provided a previous version (Blue icon) of WD Discovery is already installed. Of course if you do not use Windows 7 and only deal in Windows 10 then unlike me you should have nothing to worry about. It should work straight out of the box. Finally do not expect miracles from their help desk. Everything I have written above I had to work out for myself. They did not appear to have any idea of the above basics!!!

This external hard drive is excellent. It very small, but feels well made. It comes without any instructions, but there are several good videos on YouTube showing how to set it up. If you want to back up everything including your operating system then you need to download a specific edition of Acronis True Image. The WD software no longer include "Back up" as mentioned in the videos. This is explained on the WD website. It is simple to do and works well. It must be simple if complete technophobe like me can do it

I bought this to help me keep a common data source between my various devices. I wanted to password by protect the drive to prevent accidental deletion or editing by one of my super helpful kids. The password protection works on Windows platforms but does not work on Chromebooks. I have to use a Windows device to remove password protection before I can access files via a Chromebook, then use a Windows device to put the password protection back on. It would have been better if the description & marketing information made this clear before purchasing. The software that came with the drive doesn't work, tech support didn't have this covered in an FAQ despite it being a well known issue. If you download the latest version of the free software from their site, you'll be up & running immediately, if you wait for an answer from their tech support, you may be waiting a long time. Hardware good, software & support need to improve.

Good value for storage capacity. Plenty fast enough for recording on LG TV and TV had no problem with the 2TB size or identifying and saving directly. Cable short for TV but 3m cable purchasable via amazon meaning it can be stored on floor and still cabled to TV. Will leave others to comment on the speed and technical aspects, but if you looking to record an LG TV this works well

The best ever storage passport, speed %100 cure

Great

This product is used for personal backup of data. It's straight forward to set up and use and the unit is robust. This is not the only one of these drives that I use and find them good value for money.

I have several external drive and I have some WD drives that are ten years old and still working like new. Extremely reliable and well made product. It’s a drive that I would recommend to anyone. It’s very portable and you can bring it with you anywhere. It doesn’t heat up, the support from the WD team is amazing if you have questions or concerns. The cost could be a bit lower but I guess it’s worth paying more for a reliable product.

ottimo prodotto

Muito bom o produto, recomendo! Já uso ele há um tempo, ótimo custo benefício, quantidade de memória/espaço excelente!! Compraria de novo tranquilamente!!

Parfait. Envoi rapide merci

This is a good-quality suprisingly-light usb portable drive that allows me to store 2 TB. I have gazillion files in my computer, both of work and personal nature, plenty of photos included, so this is super handy to back up my files and, also, to save files that I don't want to have on my laptop because they consume too much hard drive space. The drive comes with a short usb plug to plug it to my laptop but it's too short for a normal desktop computer. It comes very nicely packed in an inner plastic sturdy structure that I'm keeping to have the drive insulated. No installation necessary. It took about 1 minute for the drive to set up itself in my computer. My computer came with a pop up window asking me to reformat it, but that's not necessary whatsoever and I think it came up because I tried to open the drive before the set-up was finished. Transfers of large files is fast and reliable. I wanted to buy this model in another colour, but really it is more than 10 dollars up, so this black one is still lovely and easily recognisable by the embossed lines on the top. I have had, an still have, some other WD drives, and they're very good quality and have lasted me for years so I hope this does the same good job. I will update the review in the future if necessary but, so far so good.