WD 2 TB My Passport Portable HDD USB 3.0 with software
WD 2 TB My Passport Portable HDD USB 3.0 with software for device management, backup and password protection – Blue – Works with PC, Xbox and PS4
Slim style.
Make the most of your journey with style that suits you. The new My Passport has been redesigned to feature a convenient, slim form factor and is available in a range of vibrant colors.
Backed up.
Make sure everything you create while on your own life journey – photos, videos, music, and documents – doesn’t get lost. The My Passport drive comes equipped with backup software that can be set to run automatically to your schedule. Just pick the time and frequency to back up important files from your system onto your My Passport drive.
Locked down.
Make sure everything you create while on your own life journey – photos, videos, music, and documents – doesn’t get lost. The My Passport drive comes equipped with backup software that can be set to run automatically to your schedule. Just pick the time and frequency to back up important files from your system onto your My Passport drive.
Super easy.
My Passport portable storage is ready right out of the box including all necessary cables. And with SuperSpeed USB, you can quickly start backing up everything in your life and keep driving forward.
Western Digital, the Western Digital logo, WD, the WD logo, and My Passport are registered marks or marks of Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates in the US and/or other countries. USB-C is a mark of USB Implementers Forum. Mac is a mark of Apple, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. Product specifications subject to change without notice. Pictures shown may vary from actual products. 2022 Western Digital Corporation or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Troubleshooting:
Undiscoverable by PC and cannot be repaired via software – Connect to another computer to verify if issue is with local host or product. Additionally product MUST be safely removed or ejected from host as not properly removing product form PC will also create issues such as mentioned below.
For Password protection, must install included software to enable password protection.
drive clicking, this device requires USB power only we would recommend trying the device on another computer, try another cable
Every trip needs a passport. The My Passport hard drive is reliable portable storage that gives you the confidence and freedom to move forward in life. With a sleek new design that fits in the palm of your hand, there’s plenty of room to store, organize and share all your photos, videos, music and documents. Perfectly paired with WD Backup software and password protection, the My Passport drive helps protect the contents of your digital life. The total capacity available on a 5TB drive is 4.6TB. The storage industry as a whole measures capacity in decimals. Windows based computers measure based on the binary, that’s why the drive shows as a smaller capacity
Weight: | 120 g |
Dimensions: | 10.72 x 7.49 x 1.12 cm; 120 Grams |
Brand: | Western Digital |
Model: | WDBYVG0020BBL-WESN |
Colour: | Sky Blue |
Batteries Included: | No |
Manufacture: | Western Digital |
Dimensions: | 10.72 x 7.49 x 1.12 cm; 120 Grams |
I’ve got four of these, and never had an issue with any of them. I would buy more of them, but hopefully four will do me for a while haha.
Would definitely recommend!
Great product, worked straight out of the box on my Apple iMac. Very pleased as it’s backed up two other hard drives that were beginning to fail after about 6 years hard use!
The 5TB Passport Hard Drive has revolutionized the way I manage my digital life! This compact storage powerhouse has quickly become an indispensable part of my tech arsenal.
Whether you’re a content creator, a digital hoarder, or just someone who values peace of mind when it comes to data storage, the 5TB Passport Hard Drive is an absolute game-changer. Say goodbye to storage limitations and hello to a world of endless possibilities. This device is a must-have for anyone seeking reliable, high-capacity storage in a sleek and portable package. Get one; you won’t regret it!
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 .
I have consistently bought WD HDDs over the years as their reliability is generally considered better than that of other manufacturers. Touch wood, none have failed me to date. The storage capacity question is odd – it is what it is so 5*. Likewise the tech support question – I’ve never needed to use it, so I’ve given it 3* just for being there! And yes, it is small, therefore portable, which is why I bought it, so another automatic 5*.
I’m very happy with this device. I use it as a backup for my desktop’s hard-drive. Its easy to use straight out the box and quick.
One word of caution (and why its 4 stars not 5). I’m using this to replace my current back up disk (a 2TB WD ‘My Book’), which is now over 9 years old. The old drive is about 80% full, but I struggled to copy all of this to the new drive, which is also 2TB. All disk drives divide their storage space into fixed size blocks. A file smaller than this block size, occupies 1 block, a larger file occupies two or more. The issue is that each file will occupy at least one block. I happen to have a lot of small files and it appears that the SSD has a bigger block size than the old drive, so I can’t get as many files on the new drive as the old. Its not really an issue – its just forced me to get rid of junk, but it did come as a surprise.
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.
This hard drive was a great buy and was bought for my son’s PS4, for extra external memory.
It is easy to use and format and does exactly what was advertised.
Quick delivery too.
A 5tb storage device will hold a lot of files. I have come to rely on these WD devices particularly for holding images and other information. In fact I’d recommend having more than one and backing up both regularly in order to ensure your information is held safely. Just don’t keep them with or near your computer in case of a disaster.
Its a WD hard drive. I’ve got a few of these in various sizes and they just work. Plug it in and forget about it. Its quick, small and reliable. Nothing much more to say.
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
Wanted to move away from the slow nature of a NAS drive Time Machine back up for my Mac. The small footprint means it’s not in the way on my desk and it’s much faster. I regretted not having something similar for when my previous iMac fell over and I wasn’t able to restore from a back up that was no more than an hour old.
The Amazon price for 4tb was cheaper than my company hardware supplier who couldn’t match the price even at 2TB. This was formatted and ready for a Mac but others we have used in my company came with windows formatting and a WD app for security/conversion. After trying to see if there was any value in using it for a MAC, I ended up wiping them and reformatted for our Mac devices. Far simpler – but wasn’t necessary for this 4TB one I bought.
In the end, it just sits there, doing the regular backups. Being directly attached via USB-C (it comes with a converter to the older standard) it seems very quick to load up when I took a look at the backups.
Very happy.
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
I have had this for a few months now and used up about half of it. It does come with its own lead and a converter to USB so no need to buy a separate converter if you are not planning on using its own connection. No problem uploading or retrieving data or pictures. I got this for a good price and I am happy with my purchase. I would buy it again. I have not needed Tech Support so I have not rated the service but the drive is so easy to set up (plug and play) and works so well that Tech Support was not needed.
Unlike every cheaper drive I’ve tried it actually works (so far), well worth paying slightly more rather than wasting as much money on junk.
I bought this to offload a number of videos, photos and phone backups from my windows PC.
simply plug it in, wait a few moments and it’s ready to use – super simple!
just read back other reviews and see others have complained about it being noisy. it really is. you can hear the disc spinning inside. I’m using for Time machine and some extra storage space for my new M2 Mac Mini. set up/formatting and partitioning was easy. Would recommend but be aware of the noise thing!! just have to play my music even louder now!!
First delivery of this was a dead disk. The device light comes on when connected but no further interaction – all manners of connection failed across multiple desktops and laptops. Nothing audible nor any signs of movement. Got on to product support and they agreed disk is faulty and sent out a replacement.
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.
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 🙂