I have purchased 5 Passport portable hard drives over the past 5 years and love them! I keep filling them up and then getting another! They do not require an external power supply, and just plug in to your laptop or computer with a provided USB cord. I use them to keep my laptop and our phones cleaned off for optimal performance. They small enough and so convenient to just plug in and use.
One warning I would give is, if you use a multi port USB hub with this, use one with a power supply. One of my passports crashed from using a cheap little 4 - port hub (with 2 other passports attached) with no power supply and one of the passports routinely switched from being connected to disconnected to the computer, and that evenutally ruined the device. I was able to get a forensics expert to recover my files, but not everyone has someone they know who does that! Since then, I have purchased a fully powered 7 port hub for home use (Crux 3.0 hub) and can efficiently organize my photos from one passport to another, having 3-4 passports connected with no problems.
Another thing, I prefer not getting one over 1 TB. I have purchased a 2-TB, and after it gets about 1/2 full, the speed of transfer is slowed tremendously. I will just spend a little extra and have each of them be 1 TB or less, for efficiency.
I'm in love with this little guy, and when I say little, I mean little. I was expecting a big box I was going to have to make room for, but it fits just fine in the palm of your hand. So, it's perfect for laptops, consoles, or whatever else. Extremely portable.
After reading literally hundreds of reviews on different external HDs, I finally settled on this one. And I'm SO glad I did.
First off, it took as little as just plugging it in to the USB port on my PS4 to begin. I had a notification to format it, and that took about 30 seconds. I had intentions on spending all day yesterday downloading and transferring all the games I haven't gotten to play since I bought them, but it doesn't take any time at all to download. I was extremely impressed on the download speed. I was able to download Assassins Creed, Dragon Age (and all the DLC & extras), Lego Harry Potter, Killing Floor, and Blacklight Retribution in under a few hours. Which to do all that with my PS would have taken days. When I finally upgrade to a higher TB this will be the only one I buy.
I'll update this review in a year, or if anything takes a turn.
So far, so good - but be advised that I only received this hard drive yesterday and began using it as a storage drive today. Plugged it into the USB port of my laptop, saw the WD software but didn't need it, transferred photos, videos and files over to the drive, all went well.
That said, I bought two of these. That smooth experience was not repeated with the second drive, (also a 1TB WD My Passport). When I plugged the second one into the USB port, the drive's light just kept blinking. Blinking and blinking and blinking. Wouldn't connect. Finally got a pop-up that said the drive needed to be formatted. (This did not occur with the first drive.) I formatted the drive, and of course there is no backup software on it now. So --- I'm considering sending the second one back, because I don't want a used drive, nor do I want a faulty drive.
I will update this review if anything changes with the first drive.
Got the blue version of this for $10 cheaper than the other colors. It was a little under $50 when I bought it whereas others were more like $59 or slightly under. I already know why it's cheaper in blue - I don't know if anyone remembers this, but waaaay back this little HDD was painted blue and marketed as a PS4 back up drive for a whopping $99 or some similar outrageous price. Due to that price they sat on the shelves and eventually I stopped seeing them on said shelves. That still leaves tons of stock though, which is great for bargain hunters that still want quality like me. For $40-$50 (depending on what sale may or not be happening) with included back up software and password protection, not a bad deal at all. I originally ordered this thinking to use it on my gaming laptop but ended up not needing the extra storage there, but on my measly 500 gb (200 gigs of which were taken up with unknown stuff??) Xbox One console, which with my subscription of Game Pass and use of Bethesda console mods, as well as my using it as my main entertainment center, was quickly running out. I expected it to be much larger for some reason but the small size is certainly a nice bonus. That all said, I unwrapped it (recommend keeping the packaging, makes a nice makeshift holder for this HDD should you need to move it later) and plugged it into the back of my Xbox One. It asked me what to store on it (Games & Apps duh!) and prompted me to format it which took less than 5 minutes. After that it showed up like built in storage which was also pretty nifty. Transferring games (mostly Bethesda games post Creation Club which are upwards of 60 gigs with DLC ffs) took about 10 minutes, only really slowing down on the very last transfer but not enough to be annoying. I will say this much, though I'm not sure if this is the Xbox's fault or WD's fault, do NOT try to use any video streaming apps from this hard drive. It will make the video janky and unwatchable. This may be due to the drive not being a solid state or it may be it not agreeing with the Xbox OS so to speak. Either way when I tried it I ended up having to store said apps back on the default drive, which was annoying as it took a bit of finagling in the Settings. The only thing I have left to add is that I recently moved and stuck this thing back in the packaging to protect it and stuck it in the car with me. It made it through fine and still works great. All in all yeah I'd recommend this drive. In fact I'm planning on getting a second one for my laptop in the near future. :) Ah and I bought it new. Would never recommend buying a mechanical hard drive used FYI.
Keeps all my media safe. It loaded my videos and pictures fairly quickly and it's great to be able to share them if I want, or if a family member or friend wants a copy.
You never know when your computer or cell phone will fail, as I've learned the hard way. Now I have them on this device.
You also never know when a free cloud service is going to decide that they're going to now start charging you. I once had 6gb of media, videos and pictures on Flickr. They decided after several years that now they were going to start charging for anything over 1 gigabyte that was stored. This means that if you didn't pay their new plan, or if you didn't remove 5gb worth of pictures, your oldest stored pictures/videos were going to be automatically deleted. I spent several hours uploading 5 GB worth of my pictures back to my computer because the oldest are the ones I wanted to keep more than the more recent pictures. Another thing was that I had videos on there which I had no idea the only way they could be shared is by via flicker link. You can't upload them back to your device like you can your pictures. Lesson learned there.
Google right now is the most user-friendly cloud service, and they give you 15 GB free and that is supposed to be for life, but I can just see having 15 GB worth of data on there and then one day they could say we are now going to charge you for anything over 1 GB. That would take forever so this is a great way to backup everything on your computer if you need to.
Feature Product
- Auto backup with included WD Backup software
- Password protection with hardware encryption
- Trusted drive built with WD reliability
- USB 3.0 port; USB 2.0 compatible. SYSTEM COMPATIBILITY: Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7. Requires reformatting for Mac OS X operating system
- 3-year manufacturer's limited warranty
Description
My Passport is the trusted, portable storage that perfectly complements your on-the-go lifestyle. Designed to fit in the palm of your hand, there’s plenty of space to store a massive amount of photos, videos, music and documents. Perfectly paired with WD Backup software and password protection, the My Passport drive helps keep your files safe.
I think WD hard drives are the best on the market as price/quality choice. Simple, smooth design, vibrant colors, and cheap option for those who needs some extra storage for either laptop of desktop workhorses. Having USB 3.0 on board, there is average writing and reading speed for day by day operation (do you need more?) to fulfill your needs. The only drawback of this current model is the design. I do understand that hard drive is not something like your new iPhone or Samsung smartphone with awesome case, however previous models looked more official on my taste. Also, color choice much broader now, however deeper and darker colors from previous models were looking more mature.
Finally got things running earlier today. Seems to be working just fine. Will update if anything changes in that regard, but have no idea what would change.
Fair warning, though. I was told by owners that this was strictly a “plug in and go”affair like the old Clickfrees were. Not the case. Exacerbating the situation, the WD comes with NO helpful documentation. My response was to do an internet search and I was directed to the company website. Once you’re there, look for downloads. You’ll need to download the items relevant to the WD model. THEN you can open the downloaded items and find your way through.
Again, the WD seems to be working great! Just be prepared to navigate a bit of a labyrinth to get it up and running.
The Passport PEHD is in my opinion the best. I had a Dell and it stopped working for some reason and I lost all the content on it. Fortunately I had the data stored also on an older Passport. I do redundancy on all my files for just this situation. When I ordered this Passport it was to replace the Dell PEHD. I have complete confidence that this one will not fail. The shipping container and speed of delivery were both excellent. I highly recommend WD's Passport portable hard drives.
With no reformatting, I plugged this drive into my imac (OS 10.13.4), added 600 GB of movies in an elaborate file structure, mailed it to my daughter who plugged it into a Windows 10 machine and downloaded the movies.
I alternate between four of these hard drives that hold music/videos/data and move regularly between operating systems. The only problem I have is when they get hung up and say they can't eject because something is still using the drive (happens on both OS). If I remove it without a clean eject, I'll start getting damaged files and will have to make a copy of the files, reformat the drive, and replace the files. If I shut down the machine before removing the drive, my files stay intact.
Also love the blue color, compact size, and price.
I needed this from my computer (2015 MacBook Pro). I had over 15,000 photos, countless amounts of edits, documents from school, and hundreds of videos. I’m a YouTuber my 2 channels are called Presence of the unknown and HSFL PARANORMAL. And a lot of my videos are ultra HD 1080 P and higher. Which tends to take a lot of space in the editing process. Plus all of the raw footage is all in 4K or 1080 P. So I needed a place to put them.
The thing is with the passport for Mac is you need to rewrite it. Otherwise it won’t work. Super easy to do tons of videos on YouTube showing how to do it. You have to change it in the time machine settings for Mac.
Now saying that what I recommend this product to anybody who has a Mac or even windows. Yes! Absolutely I would. It’s a great product works fantastic does what it needs to do and what it was designed to do. The storage is amazing. I look forward to using this product more and more.
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