20 Best Wireless External Hard Drive (2023 Updated)

Over the years I have had so many WD portable drivers and never had any problem. Last November I decided to get a big capacity driver for my MAC and bought this 5TB drive since it has 3 years warranty.

I have been using it for less than a year and has backed up lots of data on it, especially my photos. Yesterday when I plugged in and it suddenly showed up as Boot OS, I chatted with online support and sent him various screenshots, he confirmed the drive has corruption and cannot be fixed, he asked me to file a RMA request to get a replacement.

WD will not cover data recovery cost and will only send me a refurbished drive. The online support website did say that I could return the product to where I bought it. I just called WD online store (where I bought the product) and was told I can return but will not get any refund.

My only option is a refurbished replacement not a new product. So if I have bought it in third-party store like Bestbuy I could bring it back and get a new product replacement but not when I buy directly with WD.

This is really outrageous. I already have to spend so much time to fix my lost data and don’t trust to get another refurbished product which could cause issue. This is really not acceptable!.

I purchased the My Passport Ultra 5TB and received it today. As soon as I plugged in into my USB port, the Clicking began, aka “The Click Of death”. I noticed a lot of people that have experienced connectivity issues have laptops.

I am so glad I didn’t get hooked on those devices. I prefer speed over convenience. Being a system builder by profession and hobby, I never have connectivity issues. However, this drive suffers from mechanical issues.

Oh yes, I did experience where the computer no longer recognized the drive, but that only lasted for a short time. After seeing the price being less expensive for a 5TB over a 4TB, you know that there is an issue with the device based on its capac I have had two 1TB My Passport, and one 2TB Elements that I purchased years ago.

You know what? They continue to run a peak efficiency. My data is too important to me to trust WD any further. They sell drives that they know have an issue and continue to sell them. I have had two 1TB Passport, and one 2TB Elements that I purchased years ago.

You know what? They continue to run a peak efficiency.

Overall the drive is functional out of the box, easy to connect and get you on your way. The updated USB-C brings it into the current standard. The metal case is an improvement over the previous hard plastic so I am not concerned carrying it in my laptop bag.

The transfer performance is sufficient for data transfer and streaming as needed. A longer cable of even a few inches, would be suggestion for the next production run or model upgrades. The warranty is there if you run into any issues, but it should not be needed under normal use.

The price is starting to get up there in comparison to other brands so it becomes more a loyalty and picking it up on sale. I have numerous products from WD so for me it was the obvious choice.

Bought WD 2TB My Passport to use as storage for my photography files on my new MacBook pro 2019 running OS12. 4 Monterey. First, This drive seems to be not fully compatible with the smart drive utilities.

After using the drive for less than a yr. It started showing a failure on the WD app drive tests. Yet passed on Apples disk utilities. Did an RMA and WD sent me a new drive. Which failed the WD quick drive test.

And again, The Apple disk utilities shows as passed. Did a reformat from the one it shipped with to APFS. Drive still shows as failed on WD utility but passes in Apple disk utilities. The SSD drive seems to be accepting data from my other WD drive.

So I’m sat here scratching my head as to what is going on. WD own smart utilities won’t fully work on this drive and shows it as failing a quick drive test. Apple utilities shows the drive as fine. Drive is accepting data from another WD drive via a third party backup/copy app.

Bottom line. This drive while fast and compact. Can’t be trusted and isn’t even compatible with it’s manufacturers own utilities program.

I purchased 2 of these SDD drivers in Jan of 2021 (both are 2TB models). Transfer speeds are fast and good when using the drive. Response time of the drive is slow when the drive is inactive and then reactivated to dump files on the drive (especially when building folders or navigating folders quickly within the drive).

However, my complaint is that last week one of the two drives suddenly stopped working during a file transfer. Then the drive showed up as renamed (not the name it was given) and blank of any data (note: drive was getting closer to 80% full).

Contacted local SanDisk and had the drive sent to them but they were unable to recover the data and only planned to replace the drive free of charge. However, with replacement they would not send the old drive back.

Since I really need the data I did not agree to the replacement and am having the drive sent back to me. Possibly I will try another third party to recover the data. I have been using external hard drives for the past 20 years and never ever had an issue with HDD drives.

This is my first experience with a WD SDD drive and it is terrible. Only 9 months after purchase and failure and unable to recover my data. Also, unable to replace the drive without full surrender of the broken drive.

I have no concern to surrender the old drive if they can recover data. Even no discount to keep the old drive on new drive purchase. Solution for a bad product is just to replace a new one – whatever happened to building a quality product? This is customer’s data that the drive is suppose to be securing.

9 months on a drive that cost over 300USD. Drive was cared for and always placed in a case, never dropped, never outside or damaged in any way.

I have been using numerous WD external hard drives for years and the My Passport portable SSD drive is the worst. The backup speed is average for the SSD but viewing the backup folders and files is excruciatingly slow.

It takes about a minute to open a small file and it will freeze Windows Explorer after opening a few small files. Unlike the earlier MyPassport, Ultra Passport, Essential, WDMyCloud, etc. , that were quick to install, the Passport SSD also has poor user manual (non-existent) that lacks clear and adequate set up instructions and was agonizing to install.

I had to scour the internet for information to download additional software. I am not sure if the new unit is defective and if not, I will return it to avoid further problems with a product that I have no confidence in.

The WD – My Passport 1TB portable storage drive is a great solution if you are looking for an external portable storage drive. I previously had a WD My Passport 500 GB portable storage drive that I have used for many years, but I am finally at a point where I needed more space, so I decided to upgrade to this new device.

The 1TB of space gives me a significant amount of space for external storage. However, beyond that, I love the additional improvements with these new units. First, with the NVMe solid state performance, this drive is really fast! It says it will transfer up to 1050MB/s.

Those numbers may not mean much unless you are comparing it to the numbers for other units, but all I can say is the speed is definitely noticeable! I can do a system backup in no time, far faster than with my previous drive.

While it is great for backups, with this speed, it would also be great to use when working with large sized files or video footage that would normally take up a lot of space on a PC. The drive is really small compared to the one I previously used, making it very portable and convenient.

It measures only 3 & 7/8 x 2 & 1/8 x 5/16 thick and it is very light weight. It would easily fit in a shirt or jacket pocket. They also made it quite durable as it was designed to be shock and vibration resistant and it can withstand drops of up to 6.

5 feet. While I’m not prone to dropping things, it is nice to know if it happened that the drive would not be damaged and my files would still be accessible. It comes with a USB-C Cable and they provide a USB-A adapter, in case your PC does not have a USB-C port.

It also comes with the WD Discovery software for easy backup. I like the fact the drive is also secure, as it provides password protection and 256-bit AES hardware encryption, so my files are protected if anyone gets their hands on it.

I don’t know what more you could ask for in a portable storage drive! If you are in need of an external storage device, you can’t go wrong with this WD My Passport drive!.

Maybe I got the one out of several thousand that fails for no apparent reason. It worked great before failure. Data copies over to it extremely fast. Cost effective when on sale. I kept it plugged in to my iMac 24/7 and was never concerned because it never felt too warm to the touch.

Usually shut the computer off a few times a week to give everything a break, but apparently this drive didn’t like that. It just disappeared from my system randomly and now won’t show up. I’ve tried 3 different USBC cables and tried it on my MacBook Air as well.

Nothing will recognize it, and now almost half a terabyte of data is gone. Thankfully most of it backed up (this is why you make backups of your backups), but. not sure I’d trust this particular device again for my use case.

This drive is nice, but I feel like the next generation of this unit could be improved upon 10 fold. The smart phone app for my iPhone was finicky to get working at first, but after a few tries it worked as described.

I also noticed that ever time I plugged this drive into a Windows 7 Box it would tell me the drive needed checked and created a folder of found file parts of unknown origin. This drive also when using it on battery / wifi mode has to boot up before your device can see it, so expect a short delay, it’s not instant on, instant off.

I did enjoy the feature of being able to backup an SD card, but I feel the drive needs some kind of display, even a low powered LCD or OLED, to give you more verbose status on SD card operations and battery life, without having to use a smart phone.

Benchmarks are posted at the bottom of this section, testing with my Core i7 box using the front panel USB 3. 0 ports. I was going to give this drive 3 stars, but I settled on 4 because after I got past the few issues I had with it, it did what it was supposed to.

However lack of a verbose display, issues with the smart phone app, sluggish wifi, and silly windows files system checks really knocked the drive down a good bit. It’s not a bad product, but I feel Western Digital could do better on the next version of this item.

Crystal Disk Benchmarks Set on 5 x 100MB Seq Read: 98. 67 MB/s Seq Write: 93. 03 MB/s 512K Read: 41. 87 MB/s 512k Write: 23. 41 MB/s 4k Read: 0. 594 MB/s 4k Write: 0. 353 MB/s QD32 Read: 0. 672 MB/s QD32 Write: 0.

352 MB/s.

Overall this is a solid drive. When compared to the corsair voyager it does have slightly higher R/W speeds. On average is was 5MB faster on the read and 3 MB faster on the write over USB 3. 0 The fastest sequential reads were 120+ MB/s.

on average I was looking at 113-116 for sequential reads. Which is faster then the Corsair Voyager which lately been averaging 108- Over USB 2. 0 this drive gets 30-35 MB/s. The SD card feature is great and easy to use.

Simply stick in a SD card and as long as the drive has power it automatically backs it up. For serious photographers, or video takers this can be a great feature. By backing it up imminently you have a secure backup in case you lose an SD card , or simply you say filled a few SD cards you now have it all backed up in one place making file accessing and editting easier.

Instead of getting at home and backing up the data then. Wireless range was pretty good. Even at 90ft+ away signal was strong and reliable. This drives wireless works well it allows for maximum of 8 connections to the drive.

It says you can have 4 clients streaming HD off the drive. But how far the devices are and what files are being accessed come into account. Realistically you can have 3 people streaming different HD Movie files at the same times without ever experiencing lag.

Once you get to 4 Different HD movie accessed at the same time sometimes it can bog down the drive. but to be fair all the mechanical USB drives I used suffer from this (too much random accessing for a non SSD drive to sometimes keep up with demand).

If all 4 people are watching the same movies then there is no such problem or if 2 are watching one movie and 2 are watching the other. Overall a great product, I only wish it came with a car charger out of the box.

– Packaging and Un-boxing: – Included items: – My Passport hard drive – USB 3. 0 cable (sort of on the short-ish side) – USB power adapter – Quick Install Guide – Technical Support and Limited Warranty Guide – First impressions (before powering up and setting up): – Slightly larger than your a regular WD My Passport (but not by much) – Powering up and setting up: – out of the packaging… came “fully” charged.

Pressed the battery check button and the battery reported “BLUE”, which means fully charged. With a little over an hour of use, the battery showed “RED” which means very close to dead. Plugged in for approx.

2 hrs. went from blinking red to blinking green. Left charging overnight… woke up and power LED was solid blue. CHARGE IT UP FULLY BEFORE YOU SET TO USING IT! – easy setup via laptop – easy to setup My Passport to connect to existing wireless network – Firmware update! Old firmware: 1.

01. 09 (original firmware) New firmware: 1. 02. 17 (latest; 2nd update to date) – Originally threw an error: “Device does not have enough space to install update. ” – Ran update again… it’s downloading and installing.

Round trip, firmware update takes around 10 minutes. See the release notes for firmware update specifics. – My findings, in terms of battery life (with the battery performance on “Battery Life”) were roughly 30 minutes per 10% of battery discharge (so 1hr per 20%).

So with that, I have calculated the battery run-time from fully charged to completely dead with constant file uploads and downloads = about 5 hours. The WD webzone says “Get up to 6 hours of continuous video streaming and up to 20 hours of standby time.

” Perhaps if the drive were JUST streaming… you might get closer to 6 hours. – What I can imagine is loading the drive up with music and videos, travel a long distance without any data connection (3G or 4G), and stream content from the drive to my phone or a tablet.

– Wrap-Up: – Works as a wired drive. Works for SD card backups. Works as a wifi drive (albeit painfully slow). Transferring data from mobile devices to My Passport works half of the time. It’s about $100 more expensive than a regular USB 3.

0 My Passport 1TB drive. so you’ve really got ask yourself if you would utilize the extra features. If it were me, I would get the regular My Passport drive. just don’t see a need to have the wifi streaming and SD card backups.

On unboxing you get a nice, compact, smart looking unit. Then you plug it into your desktop PC. Despite the A3 printed sheet which contains two illustrations 1of the device showing how to connect it and 2 another of it plugged into a laptop the remaining space is taken up with their legal disclaimers in about 14 languages.

Connecting most USB HDDs is simply a matter of plugging the correct end of the cable into the device and the other in a suitable USB 2. 0 port, or better, on the PClaptopother devices etc. It appears other buyers seemed to expect this action.

Not so with the latest version of Windows 10. Disk Management did not recognise the drive, so a quick call to their support line within five minutes of opening the package was necessary. Unfortunatley my northeastern accent was as difficult for the operator to understand as was his heavy Asian accent to me.

We did manage after a few minutes and ultimately, a very pleasant conversation led to their Western Digital Lifeguard program being downloaded and installed. Its identical to Windows Disk Management except their own software recognises the HDD and allows you to initialise it.

I was also given more useful advice on connecting to DVDs etc. One useful piece of information tech support did supply was that the device should be plugged into the USB ports on the rear of any desktop PC, as the front ports tend to have slightly different voltages which can cause some problems.

Device is now working effectively and has attained copy speeds of up to 120Mbs on many of my larger files. Same sized files copied to a flash drive take a bit longer My test was a 1. 8 Gb to the HDD 16 sec and to a 128 Gb flash drive over six minutes.

I would advise anyone thinking of purchasig this item to have a close look at the description supplied. Apparently there is a new model available, which could fix future problems for buyers. AND I did notice despite complaints by some MAC users it does state you have to reformat the drive for MACs.

I bought four 5TB WD Elements drives in one year. One drive failed in three months. Another failed in less than a month. The pattern was identical. First, they overheat. Second, they start disconnecting and reconnecting after periods of intensive use (copying large files/many files).

Third, the timespans between the disconnects get shorter and shorter. Then the drives fail altogether. The only reason I did not lose valuable data this summer was that everything was backed on at least two drives and the two drives that failed were not from the same pair.

I never had this issue with 4TB and 3TB WD drives (and I own several of those). Therefore, I assume that it has something to do with design or a batch manufacturing flaw.

Great drives that are light, portable and deliver fast speeds. I’ve just bought a second one for backups! I am a happy WD product user. The quality is good and these drives look & feel modern. These drives are very portable due to their small size.

Thanks to USB 3. 0 you don’t need an external power supply as they can operate from just a single cable. On the older USB 2. 0 you will not get the speed benefits of USB 3. 0 but when connected to USB 3.

0 they can transfer data fast. The USB cable length is perfect. Not too lengthy which would get in the way and not too short making it difficult to connect. It’s about 30cm (1 ft) I believe. They are decently priced as well.

Prices have risen recently but I’ve bought the 5TB version at a reasonable price still. These drives are Plug & Play (at least on Windows machines). Just connect the drive and start using it. I highly recommend connecting your drive to a USB port either directly on the motherboard (back of computer) or from your PC case (front/top panel).

I connected one of these drives to a USB hub and the drive started making a scary clicking noise. Turns out my USB hub is dodgy and doesn’t always provide the correct power! So be careful using USB hubs for data transfer.

AFAIK, the 5TB drive is not an SSD (where the others are I believe) but a HDD which makes it a bit more vulnerable. You can hear/feel the spinning drive inside the case. It’s not loud though. Something to keep in mind.

In 2011 I experienced severe data loss, using 1. 5TB hard drives from another brand. Since then I switched to WD and have never looked back! I own many internal and external WD drives and haven’t had one fail on me yet.

This tells me WD drives are good quality and reliable. Nonetheless, drives can (and ultimately will) fail so always make sure you have a backup of your data. I keep 1:1 exact data copies/clones (and even that is technically not safe enough).

These drives are great for that purpose.

Im a photographer so I have a full terabyte worth of photos on this and the transfer rate is ok for that. I would not suggest editing with it though as it was running only 30 megs a second when transferring photos over.

This is more suitable for long term storage for soft items like photos, music or video. But for streaming or gaming you need something with a much higher rate of transfer. It’s a lot smaller than it appears in the photo.

From the photo it looks like the size of a modem it’s about the size of a an enlarged wallet in reality. No complaints does what I need it to.

Delivered about an hour or two ago, gave it some time to acclimatise to indoor temp after its journey on the cold van, which you should ALWAYS do with products like this. Plugged in to a USB3. 0 port on a Win10 machine, opens straight up to a nice empty folder, good to use straight away.

Theres some misinformation posted in a lot of reviews here, or maybe more accurately, misunderstandings, so Ill clear these up here. 1. The drive size IS 4GB. 4,000,750,497,792 bytes to be exact. Anyone complaining that its only 3.

6TB Im afraid doesnt understand how hard drive formatting works. Which is fair enough, you wouldnt know about this if youve little or no experience of these things. Once a drive of any kind hard drive, SSD, flash drive USB stick is formatted for use, you lose a proportion of all those little bytes to how file systems need to mark and index all the sections of the drive so that every bit of data can be found.

Like a little address index of where everything lives on it, if you like. And that takes up some space. So, once 4TB is formatted for use, theres 3. 63TB of actual file storage space left empty. 2. This drive is preformatted to NTFS.

Which is my own preference for this, but you can format it yourself to anything else you use, like FAT32, exFAT32, or HFS and APFS for Apples. 3. Im seeing both read and write speed, over USB 3. 0, is 115125MB per second.

4. The actual hard drive in this package is a WDC WD40NMZW59GX6S1SAFETY TIP Dont lift, tilt or turn the drive or ANY hard drive while its working. You might get away with it, but if you butterfingers it and drop it while its running theres a good chance its doneski.

Its a tiny little box and meant to be easily used with laptops, tablets, etc, so its really asking to be handled in use but TRY your best not to move it around when its working. When its not working, the heads park themselves safely away off from the disc surfaces inside, so dropping it then from a small height has a fair chance of being OK, but NEVER when its running.

I purchased this passport as a replacement for a my passport with a smaller capacity. I have been using it for about 4 weeks. Although it seems to be functioning normally. I’m giving it 3 stars because it took me several days to figure out why the software didn’t work.

I had to search online for a solution and then verify with customer service that the packaged software was no longer supported. The fix was to download Acronis True Image. It’s mind boggling to think a company would market a product with obsolete software! I’m sure everyone else’s time is as important to them as mine is important to me, so for wasting mine, plus the frustration, WD gets a 3.

Shame on you WD for your horrible product control.

If you are a gaming fanatic like me, this is a must have for your game system. The hard drive is very easy to assemble and comes with an installation guide to help get it set up. It also has a super speed USB cable that plugs right into your laptop or game system, whichever you use, and is compact in size and very portable.

This portable storage unit adds up to 4TB of storage space and has some very nice little perks. This includes password protection to keep all your stuff protected and safe, backup which is easy to use and super helpful in case you encounter any type of component problem and the security software also has guided instructions to help you get the most of your protection.

There are drive utilities to help you manage things like safety and organization of your storage materials. With a 3 year limited warranty, you can feel safe with the device and functionality. The drive is compatible with Windows 10 and newer.

I’m super pleased to have added this to my set up and having the expanded storage space I need to feel confident in my gaming with memory and being able to save bigger files.

This is my second external hard drive, the first being a Seagate that crashed along with numerous files that cannot be recovered. Though this is also a hard drive I expect it to last at least several years before experiencing problems.

Seagate made it about one year at best. Not to my satisfaction. Was considering SSDD but learned they too suffer from failure, their expected lifespan is about 3-5 years before faults begin adding up.

Recovery of data from failed SSDD is much more complex than from a crashed hard drive, if at all possible.

At first it’s just as fast as a normal 2. 5 inch drive (~90MB/s). Once it gets pretty full you may get 1 MB/s speeds or less, your whole system/apps may start to lock up. OS cache was filled (2. 6GB), it took almost an hour to shutdown because the cache needed to be flushed (containing random writes).

You will probably just force shutdown because you don’t know and lose data. Even deleting stuff can be painfully slow, hundreds of GBs taking 6 hours. It was deleting less than 1 empty folder per second.

Listing a folder with a couple of items can take minutes if it’s busy. You have to use discard/trim so that you can speed the drive back up (for newly written data) once clearing space from it. Trim after almost full (5TB) to almost empty took 45 minutes.

Will not buy any SMR drive again. If the website doesn’t mention SMR, it is reason enough to be able to return it. SMR drives are scam tier where you get 1% performance hidden away, in return you only save a couple of dollars.

When I first got it and I ran speed test using Black Magic right away while the drive is still empty, it was about 100MB+/s. After files are filled and I ran test again, it is now about 70MB/s. This USB-C interface is not any faster than the Micro-B USB/USB-A version.

But the cool thing is right out of the box, it’s already Mac formatted. There is only one cable supplied and it’s an end-to-end USB-C cable with one USB-A adapter for one end only. One star less due to speed decreases after the drive is filled up with 3.

8TB of data. If you are doing video, avoid this and get SSD external drive instead. For small file size, this works fine. If you work on very large files everyday, SSD external drive is highly recommended.

This WD 4 TB external portable drive is not the first I have purchased, which should speak for itself. I like the WD portable drives, being reliable, and not excessively priced. They are not the cheapest, but in principal, the cheapest has risks that I am not prepared to take.

I like the variety of colours to enable easy identification of its chosen content, but I am puzzled as to why different colours have slightly different prices. I also prefer the ones with round edges, but that is just personal preference.

Functionally, these WD portable drives are as easy to use as an internal drive, once it is plugged in, and can be interchanged with different content and different apparatus. I use them instead of a cloud, because, by and large, the content is kept away from the public.

You do need to be a bit careful not to drop these drives, which can stop working immediately you do, which brings me to my Headline comment for now. An SSD drive would be the more durable, practical alternative, obviously, but until a 4 TB drive can be purchased for a reasonable price, they remain out of reach, for now.

I never use the WD software, because it doesnt speak my language even though both are UK English, and that also applies to a WD Personal Cloud I have dabbled in.

Western Digital recently acquired Sandisk which has resulted in a lot of re-skinned and re-branded products coming out under the WD name. Fortunately for consumers, WD’s new SSD products deliver the bang-for-buck performance the market has come to expect from Sandisk while offering more innovative in-house software and tasteful styling.

The My Passport SSD’s feature Type C gen II offering all the throughput necessary to put the read/write speeds of up to 540 mbps to work. Users with type-C I/O on their computers will have the performance necessary to not only access swift storage but enough speed to run applications and edit large files directly from the external drive.

Despite being roughly the size of a business card, storage options range all the way up to 4TB and the fixed-memory means that it can endure all the rough-and-tumble of travel in your carry-on or along a mountain trail without resorting to the traditional “rugged” size and design language.

Samsung and G Drive offer superior performance, but usually at substantially higher costs.

I work on three different computers, all Macs, so I need a high-capacity portable external hard drive for all my camera raw files AND my Lightroom catalog, so I can do Lightroom work wherever and whenever I want.

This 4TB drive does the job. Eventually I will run out of space, but I am not a professional photographer, so I’m hoping that by the time I run out of room on this, there will be affordable 10TB or more solid-state drives on the market.

I’ve had no problems at all so far and am very happy with my set-up. I bought the Case Logic case for this. The one you want is Case Logic QHDC-101 Portable EVA Hard Drive Case. Both the drive and cable fit in easily, with a little room for a memory card/stick leftover, and it protects the drive well.

I had over 20GB of music on my iTunes and over 100 movies stored on my laptop and it started to run ridiculously slow. I found out that my motherboard was melting from too much use (and it was an old laptop), so I asked for one of these for Christmas one year and was pleasantly surprised when my parents actually bought it for me.

I moved EVERYTHING over to this and it was the best decision I ever made. Three days after I backed my laptop up to it, my computer died and still can’t be turned back on. After I got a new laptop, I plugged this bad boy in and it has made a world of difference.

I run my iTunes off of it, my pictures are stored on it, my videos are played off of it, and I could go on and on. This external hard drive seriously saved my life. I definitely recommend this product! Western Digital is a trusted brand for me and I wouldn’t buy any other company’s product.

Western Digital is the way to go. Oh, and I can put the hard drive in my pocket. WIN!.

I got this drive as a quick inexpensive portable back up when I am not connected to my larger NAS. The build quality is fantastic and it is rugged and looks great. It is about 2x as thick as my 1TB My Passport Ultra plastic but otherwise is very small and compact.

I didn’t measure speed but there was a noticeable improvement on USB3 ports over USB2. It seems much faster than previous USB drives I purchased, transferring over 1TB in just a few hours where previous drives took all night to do that.

The software it comes with is mostly worthless and not very complete. The back up software will not do a full drive, bare metal back up or let you select files or folders outside of the “my documents”.

It also will not let you back up anything but the primary drive. I used Acronis and Second Copy instead. Although it says 3TB it is actually 2. 72 TB and even when “empty” it shows some of the drive is used.

Still a lot of drive for cheap. The drive came formatted as NTFS with a GPT partition and not the standard MBR. They really had no choice as it is over 2TB but make sure this is not an issue. Not all OS’s can read GPT partitions so make sure yours can before (Win 7 is fine).

If this is a problem get a 2TB version which can be MBR formatted. I minor nit pick is that the cable did not seat snugly and fully in the device. This caused an issue with disconnecting when I picked it up.

This was not a problem with my other My Data Ultra so might be a minor defect with this unit.

The retail packaging consist of a paper box outer cover, the HDD itself is encased in a transparent plastic shell which slides out the box. Once you lift the plastic top shell you will unveil the blue aluminium drive which measures just over 4 inches long, slightly over 3 inches wide and about ¾ inches high when laid flat on the table.

In the box is also a USB 3. 0 cable, very short mind you, only 18 inches. There is also two pamphlets, quick setup guide that folds out and on the back of it you will find tech support contact numbers, the other is the warrantee with all the fine print.

The drive comes with a 3 year limited warranty. Installation is very straight forward, plug it into an open USB 3. 0 (drive is backwards compatible to USB2. 0 as well), Windows install s the driver and recognises it as My Passport drive, you get about 1.

81 TB free space, not the 2 TB as stated on the box. There is a tiny white LED on the port side of the drive that lights up and flashes as the drive is accessed. The micro USB on the drive is peculiar, not the regular one port but a one and a half micro USB, never seen that before.

I have an older Samsung 2 TB USB 3. 0 drive, below are some read write speeds for comparison on the two drives, I ran 3 tests using ATTO disk benchmark and took the average. My Passport Read – 110 MB/s Write – 108 MB/s Samsung 2 TB USB 3.

0 Read – 147 MB/s Write – 143 MB/s I must admit I am disappointed in the slow read and write speeds I got from the stylish Aluminum drive compared to an older drive.

As described. Size is small enough to pocket. WD has good (not great) technical support and warranty service if you ever have to use it. My other WD drive products are working well after a few years.

This drive has a fast transfer speed on MacBook Pro 2012 I7. Easy to setup secure app using apple keychain. Also works well on Windows 10 laptop I5. Quiet. No heat. Just works well as intended. Easy to optimize and compact drive for maximum efficiency.

Slightly more expensive than others, but you get what you pay for. Tip: buy 50% more space than you absolutely need. These drives (not just WD) start to degrade gradually in performance once you pass that capacity.

Env: development I already owned an older 120GB Passport but digital content for my scrapbooking software and iTunes pretty much filled it up so I began looking around for another portable external drive so I could move the digital content files with minimal effort.

After being extremely pleased with the Passport I already used I began researching the newer models that were not only smaller but could hold considerably more. I did not want to go too big however, something about a 1TB just seemed to much to comprehend, so I eventually settled on a 500GB Passport and chose to get black instead of one of the various other colors that it was available in (blue and pink to name only a couple).

Now keep in mind that the older Passport was very basic. There was nothing fancy about it and it did not have any special functions so it was simply an effective method of storing files that I did not want to take up space with on my computer.

I was expecting the new one to be smaller and sleeker, which it was, but did not expect all the extras. As soon as I plugged it in it became very evident that this was not going to be like the previous version at all! The new Western Digital 500GB My Passport has a password feature to prevent unauthorized usage which ensures all files will be safe and secure and a cool visual feature that monitors the volume not only of the Passport but also of the drives on the computer it is being used with.

I am not the most computer literate person but even I could see the benefits of this, no more switching between the computer and the external to see what I wanted to store where! There is also a backup feature that I have not yet played with but I’m sure it will be just as user friendly as everything else.

I was able to quickly move everything except iTunes from the older Passport and can’t wait to start moving the thousands of picture files that I have. I am confident that the new 500GB Passport will handle whatever I need it to and in the future should I ever have a need for a larger drive I can say with certainty that I will once again look for Western Digital.

Env: development.

This is the smallest and fastest hart drive I ever had. Pretty cool that technology is allowing us to store a large amount of data something that would fit almost in my wallet. Samsung is a brand that I trust because I know they are at the forefront of technology.

I have been using Samsung memory types and different styles for quite some time either it be an SD card, flash drive, microSD card and other small data forms however this is my first time using a large dataform with Samsung.

I usually hate having an external hard drive because they’re usually big and it adds weight to my computer briefcase However this little guy is just perfect. With it being rugged I don’t feel as worried to keep it on me.

The IP 65 Rating makes it water resistant and dust proof which is great for anybody typically with a hard drive as it will help against things like rain, spills, We’re a normal amount of dust that you would come into contact with like from a work bag purse office drawer or car etc.

It does also say has heat resistant material but I am wondering if this is more because it’s such a small compact size and it helps protect its own he would you will produce when downloading or uploading from the device.

The USB 3. 2 technology is really nice when supported by the opposite device such as a laptop or pc. This will allow for high data read/write speeds of up to 1,050/1,000 MB/s. If your main device does not support USB 3.

2 It will not reach the speeds most likely however will reach the max be to which your device and USBs allow. So even if you do not have a current device that supports a USB 3. 2, this will be preventative for the future as you are will already be equipped with a higher speed USB storage device or if you plug it in to somewhere else let’s say a friends computer.

Yes this will work on a gaming console. This was tested on my PlayStation 4 which was able to upload A game without any flaws. If anything the floor was with the PS4 as it has a lower generation of USB ports.

I’m sure the new Xbox and PS five probably have newer generations of USB ports which will be able to achieve higher rate read and write speeds however it is sufficient for the ps4.

Although it is not made for backing up specifically, theres no easier faster way to backup as cards into ssd or hdds. One button operation, totally worth it. The other stuff (like wireless extender or media drive capabilities) is just a bonus to me.

Just set it up, 10 mins, and you’re on your way. The app is a little sluggish but you learn to work with it. In the short time I’ve had it I’ve transferred over 500 GB’s of files, videos, pictures, music, and so on.

I have even access my files through the Roku device. The battery gets you up to 8 hours of usage.

I decided to upgrade to this newer RAV Power file hub and havent regretted it. Its easy to back up your files and photos (video takes longer) and everything works well.

I’ve had this drive running as a video storage drive, a partitioned CCC backup drive, and a myriad of other configurations in the time I’ve owned it, and it works just fine – fast and reliable thus far.

However, out of the box it makes the very irritating grinding sound typical of HDD drives reading data, but at an very noticeable volume and almost constantly when reading or writing anything at all.

I’ve used HDD’s internally and externally before that are nowhere near the volume this thing is. So just be aware when you buy that in a quiet environment this is unusable.

This is the 4th backup drive I’ve purchased from OWC. Always an easy process and great product.

I had this drive up and running in minutes, to replace one that was showing signs of wear. The transfer of data took a bit longer, but all done by dinner!

Using this external 500Gb SSD unit to clone an internal 250Gb SSD on a late 2012 Mac Mini prior to replacing the internal drive with a larger OWC SSD. Cloned Maverick system onto external and upgraded system to Catalina.

Upgraded my 32 bit LibreOffice and OpenOffice to 64 bit on the cloned drive and tested out how the Catalina system worked on my old computer. New upgraded system, programs and OWC drive working prefectly.

Pure silence of drive is wonderful. I am booting up using the external via USB2 without any issues other than the expected reduced speed, although not bad considering the age of the USB port. Of note: I tried booting up on the firewire since the mini has 800Mb/s compared to 480Mb/s on the USB 2.

0 port, but it was a no go. Only bootable via USB port. I plan to replace internal SSD and clone back system so I will get my speed back up and be ready for TurboTax which will require 64 bit processing this year.

If you are still using the old style hard drives treat yourself to a new OWC SSD. It will be hard to go back for anything other than occasionly turning those old units on for archiving – silence is golden.

MacMini is so much faster now. Should have done this long ago. Cracking the case and installing the drive was scary, but doable. OWC’s video was extremely helpful. Watched it at least 3 times before getting the courage to proceed.

I bought the kit that included the tools and external case, and that was all good stuff. (Also viewed a webpage from iFixit on this same process. Also very helpful, especially the comments by users. ) But in the end it took less than an hour.

And the results are magnificent. Only one issue: While popping off the IR plug from the motherboard, I ended up accidentally removing the entire socket off the board. (Didn’t feel like that, just pried off the plug as shown in the video.

) But therefore could not reattach the IR circuit. (Local shop says it will cost $150 to resolder it to the board. ) But I’m just running without it. Don’t use a remote, so don’t need the IR. The only problem is that the same circuit has also disconnected the power-on light on the front of the MacMini, so I lost that ability to see if the Mac is powered on.

Not a huge issue: I’m running without a power-light on the front. Everything else works great.

I bought a used, inexpensive Mac Mini 2014 Core i5 online. It came with a 250 GB SATA drive and Yosemite loaded on it. It ran somewhat okay, actually not much better than my 2009. I had wanted to run the latest OS (Monterey) which wasn’t supported on the 2009 Mini, which is why I bought the 2014.

Once I had Monterey installed on the 2014, boy, did that machine ever bog down. I got spinning beach balls for just about every mouse click. I was ready to toss the Mini into my closet and buy a brand new Mac, but then I read an article on how just swapping out the SATA drive for an SSD would drastically improve things.

So I went to MacSales where I’ve purchase many items in the past. For a very affordable price, I bought a 480 GB Mercury Extreme SSD. Delivery was quick. They had an easy-to-follow install PDF on their site.

Once I installed the new SSD and got it up and running with the new OS, man oh man, was there a big difference in performance. The little 2014 Mini was zipping through app openings and downloading websites with no effort at all.

And gone forever were those annoying beach balls. Bottom line: if you have a Mac Mini with a SATA drive, you really owe it to yourself to upgrade to an SSD. It will seriously transform your Mac and your whole computing experience.

This external drive is not shaped like a 2. 5″ SATA SSD you’d install in a computer. It looks like a NVMe ore M. 2 SATA, so more like a RAM card. It is about 4″ tall by 1 1/4″ wide and about 1/4″ thick with a single USB-C port and a tiny, pinpoint white LED on one of the short sides.

I comes with both a USB-C to USB-C cable and a USB-C to USB-A cable; both about 12 inches long. The ‘stick’ is very light weight and doesn’t lie flat if the cable has any kinks in it- which it does. I can’t get speed test results because I’m using it as a Mac Time Machine drive, but it did the initial 400gb backup in about 2 hours which is rapid considering Time Machine’s built in slow speed and background behavior.

The drive did get incredibly hot- so hot I feared the case would warp- but I pointed a fan at it in hopes of cooling it down. So far, it has performed to expectations, and was a Today’s Deal, and had an additional discount available; so was by far an excellent price.

I’ve been happy with it and hope it continues to perform well.

I am a geek guy and I really in need to have a storage device which can store large amount of heavy files and be fast to access too. And this small little guy is really very good. With daily usage and photo editing usage, I can feel it is running really fast, just like the Samsung Evo ssd that I am using right now as my windows drive in my computer.

It is not sluggish like the normal external hard drives that I am having right now. So I use this specially for quick storage and processing files on it (currently I use it a lot to edit photos). This device is also small enough for being portable and feel solid in my hand.

Not feeling cheap and it is a good point. I am always very careful when buying hard drives because I worry that the drives would have bad sectors upfront buying it. So just after I got the item, I run a scanning software on it to make sure everything is fine and yeah it is really fine.

No errors or bad sectors were found.

I haven’t had this that long yet, but this thing is EXCELLENT. It’s super fast. I’d run out of space on all my online drives (Microsoft, Google, etc. ) so I copied everything here to save and free up space.

I copied 15 GB worth of info onto here and it took less than a minute. It gets a little warm but not at all to a temperature that’s concerning, which a lot of electronic things do. Also I like that it comes with both types of USB cords so I co plug it into different types of devices.

Also has a security feature to place a password which I did not end up using, but is nice to know it’s there if I need it.

I purchased the newest MacBook Pro of the time in 2021 Christmas, and paired it with a WD 1TB My Passport. Was being told that as long as I install all required softwares, the drive will work its magic.

Turned out that wasn’t true. It didn’t work properly since the very first day of purchase, has been on and off on MacBook. Yesterday it just crashed all of a sudden while I was transferring photos into it.

Ran all drive tests on Disk Utilities but all came back to be passed. There are plenty of precious memories stored in this external drive and I seriously don’t know what to do. The drive doesn’t come with a USB cable that’s compatible with the newest MacBooks (as they no longer have ports for USB-A cables, adaptors are needed always).

Please kindly advise BUT don’t reply with the same standard template without actually reading my comment. Many thanks.

Works great! Very impressed by the potential transfer speed of 6 GBPS, though real world results are always lower. Even on a mid range laptop however I was achieving 200-300 MBPS on average. When plugged into my phone transfer speed shot up to 1.

2 GBPS so that was great as well. Love the storage and the price is right for such a large portable storage. The one drawback is the fractured and at times redundant WD drive software(s). There are multiple programs to install and manage your drive.

it would be much easier to include everything in one program. They are moving in that direction with the new EdgeRover software- that’s a must try if you have multiple storage modes and means and things are.

less than perfectly organized.

Its nice but the software to use is a bit of pain, everytime I turn on my computer I get error message that the drive cannot be started and needs to scan for errors, a real pain. It only offers backup not a clone that would continuously add files as I use the laptop.

I had to remove the password, due that when you boot it cannot start the drive and the password would not pop up, I have to manually search the app and enter password and then run the app to run the back up, kind of like the 80’s I thought we are in the 21st century and advance technology existed.

It may be a ok drive but terrible software. My old one that is 15 years old, no longer works because the software does not support windows 10 or 11, so I cannot access my files backed up. No support.

I may have same with this new one, in 5 years no support for the software or updates.

I’ve been reading through the reviews of these Elements drives and have taken particular notice of the critical ones. All I can say is that I guess I’ve gotten lucky. 4 TIMES! I have 2 My Book 8TB ( purchased in 2019 ), one My Book 4TB ( purchased in 2018 ), and this, my most recent purchase, an Elements 6TB ( 2022 ).

I have wondered if I should have just purchased another My Book 8TB as I don’t like that Drive Utilities doesn’t recognize Elements drives , but the price was very attractive, so I decided to give it a shot.

Unfortunately, I started having issues with it a month ago so I contacted WD. Customer service was prompt and attentive. A tech called ME and walked me through some diagnostics ( most of which I had already done ) and it was determined that I should receive a replacement.

The turn around time was 10 days which was a bit of a pain since my other back-up drives were full because of all of those files transferred from the Elements drive before I returned it, but I understand why that can’t ship the replacement before inspecting the return first.

In any case, the new drive is working well so far, and I by comparison, I can definitely tell there was a problem with the first one from the beginning. It HAPPENS SOMETIMES! And based on my experience with my other WD drives which not only include those already mentioned, but 2 Black internal drives ( 2TB and 8TB ) as well as an Ultrastar 10TB, I must say that I’m extremely happy my products overall, and my only experience with the return process was a positive one.

Pros: Western Digital produce by far the most reliable hard drives I’ve ever purchased. Not that I’d want to tempt fate talking about reliability but I still have their hard drives from ten years ago.

I purchased this one to support the memory of my PS4. Once unboxed and connect to my PS4 it took moments to format and began transfering all my game data to the WD 8tb drive. Over a course of a week thanks to its size I was able to install over 40 titles without making a dent in its capacity.

A WD 8tb hard drive is an excellent investment. In a world where prices keeping going up for less goods than you needed , it’s great to see a WD hard drive of this size and quality for the price of a significantly smaller and lesser quality one.

Worth the investment. Cons: No dislikes but a slightly longer USB cable would have been useful in order to place the drive in a location with better air flow.

In the last 10 years I have bought more than 20 WD Drives plus Sandisk Drives too (including passport, desktop & wireless types). I had almost no issues with WD Products except this one. I bought a 18T WD Elements Desktop Drive thru B & H Photo and Video for my personal data storage.

After I copied 6TB of data & on the next day I heard some gridding sound. That was it! The Drive can’t be detected anymore. I used Disk Management software and WD Dashboard to check it. All tells me that this drive is DEAD! I am hesitating to send the drive back for a replacement as the data I copied in this drive pertain some personal information.

Of course, the data can be retrieved by sending it back to WD but I don’t want to take that chance for someone to access the data. This drive, to me, is no useful. Reached out to WD Support Team to see if they can send me a replacement one without sending this dead one back.

WD confirmed that this one is a defective one. I can destroy it and then show them the video to prove I am not using it or pretend to use it. Waiting for an answer now. If they come back to say “no” I have no other choice but to buy another one, however it definitely is NOT WD Elements.

I believe WD My Book is more reliable.

Don’t know why the bad reviews here. I own three of these. The latest is an eBay purchase, a 20TB unit. The guy said they could not see the second drive. I have no clue what he means, but the Raid 1 volume is there, and both drives show up just fine.

I suspect people are posting negative reviews with little idea of how these work. I use 1 unit, with a usb connected IoSafe drive, to store a lot of media files and backup mine and my wife’s devices and computers.

It runs Plex just fine – and back’s up quite well with Acronis app. And I use the USB Backup app for the volume backup. I had one glitch when trying to upgrade drive sizes, but have discovered that it was the (old, re-certified) drives that were the culprit to my problems.

And as I learned about NAS units, I’ve come to very much appreciate the “industrial” approach to the software and the WD Red drives. Novices or experts (I guess I am in between) can readily use these units for years and they’ll perform for years with nary a glitch.

And perform media serving for Plex or other platforms. Not flashy, just solid performance. I am not sure what people truly expect – but these meet almost every need. It won’t transcode to 4K on the fly like some pricier units, but Plex has settings for that.

It will hold and manage all the household or small business office data just perfectly, with rock solid Raid management.

WD has generally been a great hardware platform with solid HDD performance for decades. But, NAS requires software. WD have never been able to deliver reliable software or even software designed to meet bare expectations above the level of a home user.

WD’s development teams don’t seem to comprehend why or even what that software should do. The PR series is a “professional” level family of products that barely meets that designation. It’s a semi-professional player wrapped in nursery school software.

My latest PR2100 purchase was due to complete lack of trust in OS5, the mandatory NAS OS upgrade required because WD had failed so badly on security of the prior OS3 version (with customers uninformed and none the wiser.

) It offered no rollback capability and no reasonable data recovery option in the event of a failed major OS. That and the ignorant efforts leading to the necessity of OS5 are inexcusable any way you slice them.

Making yet another unfortunate purchase seemed my only way to proactively address WD’s total disrespect of customer data. I would have a blank slate for the upgrade and could later migrate from the old NAS.

While awaiting the new NAS I found a less expensive alternative to offload a disaster recovery copy. The new NAS was returned unopened for refund. Sadly, OS5 is an embarrassing and childish bit of work that has severely damaged WD’s image.

It’s clear that WD leadership and development teams are clueless and far from any reasonable quality metrics and best practices. It’s simply unfathomable how WD can allow this to continue.

This device comes with no users guide or manual. It comes with a diagram of how to plug it in and connect it to the router, turn it on and it also give you a web address to sign into to get setup instructions.

Basic setup is fairly easy, just follow the online instructions. Learning to configure and actually use this device takes a bit of research and probably a few calls to WD Support. I havent owned this very long; Im still going through the learning process.

I’m using two WD 6 TB Red NAS drives in a RAID 1 configuration, which means the second drive backs up the data on the first drive. If the first drive fails, my data is saved on the second. Keeping that in mind, you may want to opt for larger capacity drives.