WD 5 TB My Passport Ultra for Mac Portable Hard Drive – Time Machine Ready with Password Protection, Silve
| Weight: | 229 g |
| Dimensions: | 11 x 8.15 x 2.11 cm; 229.63 Grams |
| Brand: | Western Digital |
| Model: | WDBPMV0050BSL-WESN |
| Colour: | Silver |
| Batteries Included: | No |
| Manufacture: | Western Digital |
| Colour: | Silver |
Would definitely recommend!
just died on me one day, started clicking. WD said they would reeplace the drivee as still under warranty, but not pay for retriveal of my lost files.
The whole point of the files is to back-up and keep my files safe??
simply plug it in, wait a few moments and it’s ready to use – super simple!
A good unit, does what it says on the box
WD have the best customer service. They helped me set it up as i had a few issues, mostly my inability to set it up. They were great and it works a treat.
When plugged into a USB-C port on my motherboard, I got around 100MB write rate on in my experiance is pretty good for a mechanical external HDD.
Good value for money too.
The Ultra version of My Passport features a half metal enclosure (though to be frank it’s like tin) and USB-C cable with USB-A adapter, making it convenient for any modern Mac. The drive is much smaller than I anticipated and could easily fit in a jacket pocket! Though the lack of protection suggests this wouldn’t be a good idea…
Being sat on a desk with its rubber feet, quiet operation and sleek design, I think this makes the perfect Time Machine companion. A general rule of thumb is that your Time Machine should be at least twice the size of your Mac’s drive, so 2TB seems to be the sweet spot for most people. Also keep in mind that the 4TB model is not only a lot more expensive but also twice the thickness.
No issues!
The replacement works fine – connects first time. So now I got 5TB in a single disk, hurray. Noted what other reviews said about the connection cable, I will try get a better quality one to try – speed is poorly. Between another USB 3 disk (“X”) via the desktop to this 5TB disk (type C), over the same USB powered hub (100w), the speed maxed at 30MB/s, with a bit of 31. Slightly slower speed, averaging about 22MB/s when copying from same 5TB disk to itself. Maybe 5400rpm answers it.
This is copying 120GB folders and files.
I am after the capacity, much less about the speed.
Further tests, copying from X drive to internal SATA disk on another computer over the same LAN, the speed peaked about 40MB/s, mostly in the region of 32MB/s. Copying back to the same SATA disk peaked at 82MB/s, mostly 45MB/s. The SATA disk is for storage rather than speed, 5400rpm.
While writing this, I also discovered that using my alternative type c cable (not sure if it is better or worse than the supplied short cable), along with the type c – A adaptor, has been stable, compared to (a) the same cable and adaptor to the usb port on the front panel (motherboard header), and (b) the same cable on to the type c, front panel on mb header. In both cases of (a) and (b), the drive “disappeared” / disconnected when not in use for say 2-3 minutes. I assume that’s because of the quality of the cable and lack of power. Using the powered USB hub solved the problem. But next on shopping list is a good quality type c cable.
Happy to give 5 star however for many people speed will be important. In longer term with larger capacity, this disk with its speed will quickly rank near bottom. When I start using this for live reading and writing video processing and scratch temp it will struggle to keep up. So, 4 star.
–Update–
With a new 100w type c cable :
— On type c header on motherboard,
– copying from from the X drive to the 5TB, this peaked at 40MB/s, with a bit of 41,
– writing back to the 5TB (copying) peaks at just over 13MB/s (didn’t achieve the 22MB/s above)
— On type C with USB adaptor into the 100w powered USB hub
– copying X to 5TB: surprisingly, this time it is peaking 20MB/s (second test, same outcome)
– copying 5TB to itself: also just over 13MB/s
Rather confused with the lower speed with the new type c cable. Is it doing some load balancing / queueing.
I then tried copying one file 565GB from same X drive to the 5TB (over 100w hub), peak is 20MB/s. Copying the file to 5TB itself, same as above, just over 13MB/s.
Not sure what to make of it. A big tanker indeed but not sailing in a rush.
Nice size. Lightweight and easily carried in a sleeve or case, with a Macbook.
I have this unit formatted into two x 1TB drives. One for Time Machine backups, the other as external storage, which is quickly necessary on a laptop with only 256Mb of internal storage. Set-up as a Time Machine drive was straight forward, as was formatting and partitioning the drive, after looking online for instructions first!
So, why only 4 Stars?
There are two reasons, the first of which is quite minor but irritating. As can be seen, the case colour doesn’t match the Macbook colour.
Secondly, and most importantly, the drive comes loaded with bloatware from Western Digital. A 2Tb drive is down to around 1.8Tb out-of-the-box with the excessive amount of unnecessary software that Western Digital try forcing on people. Personally, I paid for storage, not second-rate software. Luckily, a quick format gets rid of the unwanted software.
A common complaint is that they have bought a 5TB drive and only got 4.5TB. That’s how hard drives are made and it has been for decades since they were first designed. Yes, a 5TB drive will only have 4.5TB in the same way a 32GB memory card will only have around 27GB. It isn’t a rip-off or a con, that’s how they’re measured. I’ve seen ludicrous things like people asking Amazon to send them the missing 0.5 TB in the post (?) or complaining that if they bought 6 apples then they wouldn’t expect to only get 5. True, but would you eat ALL of each apple? Even the core? No, there’s nearly always a bit of waste in anything you buy.
As for the speed, it transfers data at the rate of a steady 121MB per second as you can see from the image I have uploaded. The reason people get lower speeds is that they’ve plugged it into a USB 2.0 port instead of a USB 3.0. Look for a blue USB port, plug it in there and the speed will be fine! If you have a green port then that’s fast too. I’ve had no issues at all with speed at all, despite this drive drawing all of its power from the PC.
People complain about how slow it is when it’s plugged into USB 3.0 because it has very low speeds when they’re copying lots of files. Again, this is the user not understanding how hard drives work. They will always copy big files faster than lots of small files. Think of it like me tasking you with carrying a big box from one side of the room to another. It may be heavy but it’s just one thing to move. Now imagine me tasking you with carrying 100 tiny boxes from one side of the room to the other, being able to only carry one box at a time. It will take you longer because you have to keep going back and forth – just like a hard drive does!
There is nothing wrong with this drive at all. It’s fast and so small it fits in a shirt pocket. I didn’t have to do any set-up at all, just plug it in and off I went. There was the usual Windows error message saying the drive had errors but then when you click to repair the drive” it says it doesn’t need repairing because there are no errors! That’s a quirk of Windows 10 that I have with every drive I ever plug it.
Buy it and enjoy it – it’s great!
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!!!
In macOS Platform
1.Connect your Western Digital My Passport drive to a Mac computer, and let macOS detect and mount the drive for use. Now, a new hard drive icon will appear on the Desktop.
2.On macOS Dock, selectFinder. Navigate toApplications>Utilitiesand select theDisk Utilityapplication.
3.When the Disk Utility opens, choose the Western Digital hard drive icon from the sidebar. Next, click theErasetab.
4.In theErasedialog window, select theVolume Formatdrop-down list and chooseAPFS(native filesystem), or ‘MS-DOS (FAT)’ orex-FAT. The ex-FAT file system is best for formatting WD My Passport on Mac.
5.Click theErasebutton. Let macOS erase data on the drive and reformat it to APFS, FAT32 or ex-FAT format. Once formatting is done, you can use the drive in macOS or OS X as a regular hard drive.
Ok, here is my review. it took me 10 minutes to figure It out. A bit disappointing, as I never had this issue for over 12 years! I bought many external hard drives and can use them right away on Mac. Didn’t think it happen on WD, and yes, this is my first WD hard drives. At first, I don’t know is a format problem. So it took me some time to figure it out and fix it. Give it 4 stars as this issue shouldn’t happen in 2021.
P.S, If you found this review of us, I’d really appreciate a helpful vote so that I know I have helped somebody out there! Thank you 🙂
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 🙂
When first connected it backed up 2 or 3 times, then said ‘back-up failed’. Googling and experimentation ensued. I downloaded the more comprehensive WD Utilities software and used it to ensure the sleep function was not the cause of the failure. It would then back up once after restarting, and the next backup would fail as the first one still said ‘in progress’. Restarting meant it would again back up once, then fail the second time.
Further Googling found instructions posted by someone allegedly from Apple Support to use Apple’s First Aid function after restarting the computer in Recovery Mode, the object of which was to ensure both drives were in the same state, and fix minor issues in one or other of the drives. The drive was then deleted. I did this twice as it did not work the first time, and the second time I did all the drives on my computer including the WD backup.
The problem notification changed to something else, I forget the exact wording, but it still failed after the first backup. Then yet more Googling suggested removing all the WD Utilities (which I downloaded separately as part of problem-solving) and WD Discovery (came pre-installed) software. I searched my hard drive and deleted all WD software. Then restarted the laptop and it backed up flawlessly. It has functioned perfectly ever since, backing up as regular as clockwork.
As I said, it’s working great now, but it took more than two weeks to sort. I contacted Amazon support and they promptly offered to replace it (great service from Amazon), and that was the point at which I got it working.
All in all it is fine now, but the key issue for me is it says ‘Time Machine ready’ (which is why I bought it) meaning in my book it should be plug and play. In my experience it was not. Still, a happy ending overall.
EDIT: after a further two months of working flawlessly the problem returned. I returned it and got a refund.
However, upon plugging in the drive to both computers, each came up with an error saying the drive was ‘corrupted’ or the disc ‘could not be located’.
So, I am currently in the process of formatting the drive, I have gone to the Western Digital website and have found the appropriate programs to reinstall into the device and see if that works and I will edit an update on my progress after said trials.
It’s a pain to be honest on something that should just be plug and play.
In addition (as in another review I had read and I can confirm) it was shipped in only an Amazon cardboard sleeve, not the best way to treat a fragile harddrive.
EDIT:
The drive was replaced within a couple of days, the new drive was shipped in a bubble wrap envelope and worked immediately, was uncorrupted and had all of the initial files installed as they should be. I ran all drive checks just to be sure which took its time but was worth it to learn the true condition of the drive.
The drive passed all tests, which I then waited a month before running again to make sure no underlying weaknesses were unveiled, the drive passed all these tests again so I have now taken the liberty of updating my review.
4-star, it’s good drive, ashame about the first drive I received, I don’t know the chances or receiving a defective drive but I have read other reviews cataloguing similar issues, I’m glad it was replaced without any problems, but it’s a shame I have lost so much of my time dealing with it.
I hope this edit helps refine your decision to purchase this drive, I hope it gets back to the distributor to better learn how to treat a harddrive and the manufacturer to improve their equipment and testing if it left the factory in this condition.
Thanks
The main reason I bought this drive is the 3 years warranty, compared to the 2 years on the WD Elements. At the time of writing this this drive was 93.50 and the Elements was 84 so the 10 difference for me was worth paying for the 1 year extra Warranty.
I have included a photo of the box that shows the 3 year warranty, as well WD website confirms it. I do not see it mentioned on the item’s description on Amazon which is a missed marketing opportunity for this product because it is one of the main features that separates it from the WD Elements, that clearly shows 2 years on its box.
Another advantage of this hard disc is the USB Type C connector. If you use this on a wide array of newer phones and slimmer devices that are starting more and more to have this connection. Buying a drive with this connector helps somewhat future proof your device. Who knows what slim device you may wish to hook this up to in a year or two. It thankfully also comes with an adapter that connects to USB 3. However, I wish WD had included a lead at least 1.5 times the length it is very short, and one of the few negatives I can think of regarding this product.
Again, for me the main reason I paid the 10 extra for this item over the cheaper WD 4TB Elements, is the extra 1 year warranty. I often travel, or move the data around to different locations. I am always concerned regarding mechanical drives when they get banged around or moved or thrown about in a bag on a bus or Tube. For me the extra year of warrant is worth the added cost. Your needs may vary and the extra cost may put some people off.
By the Way, do not Buy this drive if you intend to ‘shrunk’ it. Also known as breaking it out of the plastic case, because according to my friend the USB power interface is soldered directly onto the drive, and you can’t use it as an internal drive as there is no way to connect it to the Sata cable. I looked around at some videos on Youtube that confirmed a lot of WD 2.5inch drives are like this. I can not confirm it myself though, as breaking it open would Void the warranty and that was my main reason for purchase.