Western Digital WD My Passport SSD hard drive review

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In this age of 4K video, thousands of photos on our phones and computers, and a culture that doesn’t like to delete anything, having enough storage for all your digital files can be tough. Sure you can pay for additional cloud storage, but that definitely adds up.

A better option is to consider a compact portable storage drive, like the new WD brand My Passport™ SSD in capacities up to 2TB1.

I’d like to thank Western Digital for sponsoring this post. While they have sponsored this blog and video as part of an Influencer Activation for Techfluence and told me about its key features, they haven’t told me what I can or can’t say, so these thoughts are my own.

Let’s face it: storage devices have been pretty utilitarian, focused on capacity over durability and without much concern for style—until now.

The new WD brand My Passport SSD is super small; with a thickness that’s smaller than a stack of business cards, and it’s sleek, rounded and ultra slim and light.

This is the kind of portable storage you can truly take anywhere. Plus, in some other cool color combinations, the WD-brand My Passport SSD is the one to choose if you want a little life in your laptop bag.

This drive is also shock and drop resistant up to 6.5 feet and it’s compatible with both Mac and PC.

More than just a pretty package, the My Passport SSD offers blazing fast speeds powered by NVMe™ technology, and this new palm-sized drive allows work from home folks and business users to transport, save, access and protect the content they need to.

So what’s an SSD and why might you need one? The Cliff Notes version is this: SSD stands for Solid State Drive and an SSD is a bit different than a standard hard drive. While they both perform the same basic functions, (that is storing your valuable data), hard drives are essentially spinning metal disks and the data is accessed when they’re powered and in motion. A solid state drive by contrast stores your data on connected flash memory microchips, which makes SSD drives faster and more quiet since there are no moving parts. Understandably these drives tend to cost a bit more than traditional hard drives.

Let’s talk about the guts: The My Passport SSD delivers read speeds of up to 1050MB/s2 and write speeds of up to 1000MB/s2.

The My Passport SSD helps keep your content secure: it has password protection with 256-bit AES hardware encryption to help protect valuable content easily and without a lot of fuss. Just connect it to your laptop or computer and transfer files in seconds.

It can also work as a backup device for Apple’s Time Machine, which is what I was most interested in it for, though it’s worth noting you do need to re-format it for that. [please see note]

Want to connect other cloud-based accounts and services?
Included backup software3 makes it easy to move high-capacity files to your drive or cloud service account. The My Passport SSD drive’s WD Backup™ software can be set to run automatically on a schedule. Just pick the time and frequency to back up important files from your system onto your My Passport SSD drive.

Best of all, there’s no setup needed to use and copy files right away; you can plug this in and use it right out of the package. The My Passport SSD uses USB 3.2 Generation-2 technology, and it comes with a USB-C™ cable and USB-A adaptor so it can work with both older and newer connections.

The drive is available in Gray, Gold, Red and Blue in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities and has a 5-year limited warranty. Prices start at $169 CAD.