WD 5 TB My Passport Portable HDD USB 3.0 with software

1 TB Drive. Western Digital. Storage for backing up Photos. Small compact, would fit in your pocket no problem. Comes with a USB. Small light flashes when uploading / Downloading . Silent operating .

Needed an external hardrive and this fits the bill.
Beware… when setting this up, select to share the product otherwise it will only load to 18%.
Once installed (about 5 mins), easy to use and works great.

was actually setup for PC but easily configurable as Mac Time Machine. I didn’t need any tech support and as its a backup device it dosen’t move so No stars for tech support and portability means not applicable

Review from a non expert here. Difficult to know which to buy if you don’t know anyone who knows about these things. This was my fourth one of these and mostly great. One of them stopped working with the motor going after a few years so I would always have backup copies and probably replace every few years. That being said, I’ve just purchased 2 more

The internal drive model is WD50NDZW.

As for performances please look at attached speed test was done on USB 3.0.
Unfortunately, large corporations don’t want us to owe our things, they also prevent other by reusing the drives for something else.

I mean this drive comes with USB interface pcb that prevent you from ripping disk apart and plugin it in directly as SATA.

Kindly advice do not open it cause afterwards the only way of closing is to use super glue.
Normally this type of drives comes with the clips but this time its all glued in like those “smartphones”.

I want to correct the false information left in many reviews from people that simply don’t understand what they have bought or how to use it. There is nothing wrong with the speed or size of this hard drive, let me explain.

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!

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 🙂