• No noteworthy dowsnides Breakdown of the Features Starting off with the basics, My Passport is available in 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB capacities. It uses the USB 3.0 data connection, which also powers the drive and is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 ports (don’t expect the same speeds, though). The drive comes with a slightly shorter 2-year warranty but, seeing as the vast majority of customer are positive, you probably won’t even need it. WD My Passport also comes with three tools to help you get the most out of their product. • WD Backup – does what it says on the can. Helps you set up an automatic backup by allowing you to choose the files and folders that need to be backed up and the frequency of the backup. The interface and options list is rather simple but gets the job done. Whether your Mac supports USB 3.0 or 2.0 plug the USB cable in and your Mac will talk to the drive at the speed the Mac or Macbook Pro can handle. The Mac version of this software is supplied on this drive by default on the 'for Mac' version of the My Passport drive - if you pay the extra for that flavor. The Wd My Passport for Mac scored 104Mb/s write speed and 105Mb/s read. Drive has USB 3.0 inerface, if you want thunderbolt connection you can look at Wd My Passport Pro, which has capacity up to 4TB and is much more expensive. • WD Security – this tool uses the drive’s in-built 256-bit AES encryption and allows you to set up a password for your drive. This would prevent data theft, as anyone who would potentially steal your drive would have to the impossible task of cracking the 256-bit encryption. Having this tool included is very handy and saves you time looking for 3rd party software. • WD Drive Utilities – provides diagnostics, registration, and a couple other technical options for managing the drive itself. Most likely, you’ll use your operating system’s integrated drive management tools to erase, format, and defrag a drive, but it doesn’t hurt to have some extra options for managing your data. The drive will also contain the WD Discovery software, which is less of a standalone tool, and more of a launcher and update software for the other WD programs. Overall, the software package included with the product is solid, to say the least. Freeware folder lock software. • Make Wallets. • Backup files to a secure cloud. • Protect USB/CD/Emails. The only downside to it might be the lack of an NTFS driver for Mac users, which would complete a Swiss army knife of software tools, but maybe that’s just me. This 5400RPM drive’s performance is around the usual 90-110 MB/s, which depends on too many factors for us to give an exact number. My Passport is compact enough to easily fit in a backup or a purse. Design and Alternatives The re-designed drive case features a wave pattern on the bottom half of the drive and a sleek, polished design on the top half. My Passport’s interesting design is available in a variety of colors – black, white, blue, red, orange, and yellow. It’s also available in black-silver and white-gold schemes supposedly called My Passport Ultra series, which is actually the name of an entirely different portable hard drive model from WD. However, telling the difference between the two models is easy, so this is just my scrupulous inner-researcher ranting about the somewhat unorderly way WD represents their products. The drive’s dimensions are 4.4 x 3.2 x 0.85 “ (11 x 8.2 x 2.1 cm), as per usual with portable drives, with the slightly thinner 1TB version coming in at 0.64 “ (1.63 cm). The 1TB version is also a bit lighter. Refresh for chrome on mac. This makes the drive easy to hold in the palm of your hand, carry around in a backpack, or a purse. For the sake comparison, we picked two other all-around decent portable hard drives – Seagate Expansion and Toshiba Canvio Connect II. The Expansion is, on average, a bit cheaper than My Passport. However, the reason for this is the lack of any native backup and security software features, as well as a shorter warranty of just 1 year. ![]() The Expansion portable hard drive is as bare-bones as it could be, making the lower price much less appealing, especially in comparison to everything that the Passport has to offer. As for Toshiba Canvio Connect II, the price, on average, is roughly the same as Passport’s, with Canvio also including an NTFS driver for Mac, making cross-platform installation and usage easier and hassle-free. The Canvio is also a bit smaller than most other external hard drives, My Passport included. So if saving every cubic inch of space is important to you, and/or if you want a cross-platform drive for both Mac and Windows computers, then the Canvio would have a slight lead over My Passport. If you’re looking for at least 4TB of portable, though, know that the Canvio only has 3TB of capacity max, making My Passport the more appealing choice here.
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