The popular hard disk manufacturer, Western Digital has introduced a new edition of My Passport USB 3.2 hard drive that comes with password protection, built-in 256-bit AES hardware encryption, and offers up to 5 TB of storage capacity, starting at Rs 3,899 on Amazon India. Here’s what you need to know about the WD’s My Passport ultra-portable hard drive.
Design, Build, & Features
On the design front, the WD My Passport has a new sleek & stylish design that’s just about as compact as to fit in your palm easily. The WD My Passport has been redesigned to feature a convenient, slim form factor, making it perfect to slip into pockets or just about any bag.
The hard drive is ultra-portable and light in weight and is sized just about a standard size passport. The top side has a USB 3.2 interface with an LED power indicator. It has a colored exterior front with a Black color back, it’s available in a range of 3 vibrant colors – Red, Blue, and Black.
The My Passport drive offers WD Discovery software which lets you secure your data, it has password protection and built-in 256-bit AES hardware encryption to help keep your data secure. The password can be personalized, you can set your own password using WD Discovery.
WD Discovery also lets you connect to popular apps and cloud storage services such as Facebook, Google Drive, and Dropbox. You can seamlessly import, organize, and share your photos, videos, and docs to the My Passport drive. WD Discovery can also manage your drive through WD Drive Utilities.
The My Passport drive is equipped with WD Backup software which lets you backup your data on the go. You can set it to run automatically as per your schedule. Just pick the time and frequency to back up your important data from your computer into the My Passport drive.
Performance & Benchmarks (Speed Tests)
The WD My Passport drive uses the superfast USB 3.1 (1st gen) port for faster data transfers and is compatible with the USB 2.0 ports. Here the complete information provided by the CrystalDiskInfo software.
Speaking of the performance of the drive, we tested the read and write speeds using the CrystalDiskMark disk benchmark and here are the results. The read and write speeds are above 120 MB/s which is good for a portable hard drive running at 5,400 RPM. The speeds might be significantly higher on SSD portable drives. Our tests are based on the USB 3.0 interface using the MSI Apache Pro (GE72QF) laptop.
I also tried to copy a 1.29 GB video file using the USB 3.0 port on the Macbook Air, and it turned out that the file took about 11 seconds to copy from 0% to 100%.
The drive is capable of delivering USB 3.2 speeds, so the read & write speeds might be different if used on the USB 3.2 gen 1 interface.
For the variants, the WD My Passport hard drive is available in four different storage variants – 1 TB, 2 TB, 4 TB, and 5 TB. The price for the variants as per Amazon India are,
- 1 TB – Rs 3,899
- 2 TB – Rs 5,357
- 4 TB – Rs 8,055
- 5 TB – Rs 9,399
WD offers 3 years limited warranty (worldwide) with WD Security and WD Backup features.
Verdict
The WD My Passport is among the compact and ultra-portable external drives and seems to be an excellent portable drive. The USB 3.2 interface is a plus one for delivering faster speeds and the design is quite appealing as compared to the previous generations. In addition to that, the strong 256-bit encryption is great for data protection in case of loss or theft. The WD My Passport drive is arguably one of the best hard drives you can get in its class.
