Customer Ratings & Reviews

The first thing you notice when you unbox the Western Digital My Passport 4TB drive is how heavy it is for such a small product. The next thing you realize is how slippery it is. The case has been changed to hide fingerprints but in doing so, it is now very slippery and difficult to hold. The USB 3 cord shipped with the drive is about 18 inches long. If you are using the drive on a laptop on a desk or tower pc, this shouldn't be a problem, however, I found when using my laptop in real-world applications (read sitting in my recliner) and the drive is sitting on the arm, it's slid off more than a few times. The slippery fingerprint resistant surface didn’t help. The drive itself is a 2.5 inch 5400 RPM laptop drive with a USB 3.0 interface. There is an LED status light on the drive but it is very dim and difficult to see. You can turn it off using the WD Drive Utilities once you install it from the WD Discovery application. The WD Security provides 256-bit hardware data encryption for the drive and you don't have to have the software installed on other PC’s to input your password and access your files which is very helpful. WD Backup does just what it says, allows you to select your files for backup and schedule when it happens, either hourly, daily or monthly. An initial backup created about 8GB of files using default settings. The initial backup took considerably longer than I expected. Several speed tests indicate I’m getting about 23 MBs write and 29 MBs read speed, significantly less than the USB 3 standard of 5 GBs throughput. Overall, I was not blown away with the software tools other than the encryption. The drive it self nothing to write home about but it does pack four terabytes of storage which will work just fine with my media files. A perfect drive would use USB C and have a 7200 RPM internal drive. I would recommend this to a friend for inexpensive secure storage.

This is a standard portable HDD. It is a 5400 RPM drive so that limits the data transfer speeds. It cannot take advantage of USB 3.0. What you trade for speed is cheap storage and lots of it. It won't be blinding SSD speeds, but you're also not paying double the amount of money for 1/4 of the storage. The drive comes with WD Discovery for either Windows and Mac. You can set up the hardware encryption with this app. With the encryption software, you can set a password so that whenever you access the hard drive you have to enter the password. You can protect your private data. You can set up scheduled backups through the app. You cannot schedule it through Windows if you have hard drive encryption enabled. Some things that people (me included) are worried about is the longevity of the drive. Hard drives are spinning drives. With those moving parts, they are susceptible to damage, even more so if they are moved around frequently as portable drives are intended to. If the drive fails, then it is fairly expensive to recover the data. If it is encrypted, then you would have to provide the password to whoever tries to recover the data. So the encryption can be a double edged sword. If you used the drive as the sole source of storage and not as backup, then you would be out of luck and the data might be gone. All in all, a good drive. It gets the job done. As with all spinning hard drives, there are always concerns with longevity. As long as it does not move around too much (despite being "portable"), I think this drive is perfectly reasonable.

Normally I try to give a more detailed review on products, list the good and bad, give examples how that matters in typical use cases, etc. But let's be real. This is a portable hard drive. Yes, I can post benchmarks and numbers, but it really comes down to how much stuff can it hold, how durable is it, and how fast can it read write? That doesn't require an elaborate pro/con breakdown. On my computer, when copying to and from a SSD over a USB 3.1 gen 1 port, the My Passport maintained ~125 MB/s both ways. That's par for drives that can be powered off USB alone. I've seen a few spindle drives go faster, but in general if you want a high performing portable drive that doesn't require an external power source, you'll need to spend more to get a portable SSD. The differentiating aspects between hard drives now will mostly come down to price and extra features. WD warrants the drive for three years, which again is about par. It would be nice to see a 5-year warranty, like they give to their higher performing Black drives. Then again, I've got a few WD drives well past their warranty date that still function fine. The "big" feature here is WD offers encryption for the whole drive, but don't get too excited about it. It's a password-based key ( you can set your own password ) that's ok for normal day use, but it's not what I'd call enterprise-grade encryption. If you want to make sure your kids don't accidentally mess up your work files, or if you want to protect your college home work being copied by your classmates, it'll do. Dedicated thieves trying to steal corporate secrets can get around it without too much hassle. All in all, I give 4 stars because it's a solid, reliable drive priced right on the curve ( $120 as of this writing ). There's nothing inherently bad with it, but it doesn't go out of its way to offer anything particularly special for that price either.

Where do I begin? This little black box is by far the fastest portable hard drive I have ever owned. It was able to back up my entire MacBook Pro in less than an hour! It has a sleek compact design about the size of two decks of cards and can hold a whopping 4 TB of data! It replaced my older model passport which wasn’t even 1 full Terabyte. Now I have it connected to my router to use for a massive whole home server which allows more than enough space for both my desktop and my MacBook and my entire movie/video collection and it’s not even half way full. This is by far one of my favorite tech gadgets of 2019 and is a must have for anyone who wants to keep their computer(s) backed up at all times. The only reason I didn’t give it a five star review is for a Mac user it can be a little confusing to set up with time machine. But absolutely a must have product!

So far, I am impressed and very happy with the WD - My Passport 4TB External USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive with Hardware Encryption. I set mine up on my self-built windows-based desktop PC and it couldn’t have been easier to setup and use since all you really have to do is plug it in to your PC. The included USB cable provides the power required to operate the drive and it is nice not having to deal with an additional cable for power. I used to use an old external drive enclosure with old hard drives leftover from old systems for backup purposes but it was large, noisy, and required power from another source. All of these issues have been resolved by this My Passport drive including the sound issue despite the fact that it still uses a mechanical drive. This brings me to my next point which is that despite being labeled a “portable hard drive”, I think it should primarily be used in a stationary system since the internal components of mechanical drives are susceptible to damage if they are moved around a lot. The hardware encryption is a nice feature but becomes a bit less necessary if you don’t use this as a portable drive and instead simply set it up on a stationary system like I have done with mine. The included software is user-friendly and very easy to figure out and operate which is great because it really helps the drive do what I feel it is best designed for: backing things up. If you are looking for a drive with a great amount of capacity for your stationary system, you can’t go wrong with this My Passport 4TB External USB 3.0 hard drive and I highly recommend it!

I can't speak enough about how easy this drive is to set up and use. This is no doubt a combination of the way that Windows 10 immediately recognizes the drive and waits ready to transfer data and the ease to which Western Digital has set up their software for quick backups of your system. The 4 TBs of space that is available should also prove to be enough for most users to back up at least one system and all of their digital media! The look is very subtle but functional, not the most flashy drive but still quite stylish!

I use WD hard drives almost exclusively because of their reliability. This one is no exception. It’s very fast and it comes with a nice app which make transferring files a breeze. Data transfer is extremely fast due to the USB 3.0 port. It does not heat up as I thought and it got its own hardware encryption which I prefer to windows software encryption. The footprint is square so designed is plain, but for back up and portable storage it does an excellent job. I got 3 of these for my photos, PC’s and laptops backups.

I like this drive. It is in a small form factor for a mechanical drive, just a bit bigger dimensions than a deck of playing cards. It has no vents in the solid plastic case. The activity led is a muted white color (which can be turned off via the desktop PC app WD Discovery). The WD Discovery app is also used for another of WD's products, My Cloud Home, so you might already have it installed. Another option that WD Discovery gives you is the ability to easily set a password and password hint for the My Passport drive. When setting the password you have the option to auto unlock the drive on just the computer from which you are setting the password. And WD reminds you that if you lose the password, you will lose access to your files and will have to reformat or erase the drive to remove the password. I tested the speed of the drive (hooked up via usb 3.0 port) via UserBenchmark and got the following results on an empty drive: WD My Passport 4TB 3.5TB free, Operating at USB 3.1 Speed SusWrite @10s intervals: 111 118 112 116 113 106 MB/s Relative performance 60.8% Good Read 130 Write 112 Mixed 81 SusWrite 113 145% 109 MB/s So about what you would expect for an external mechanical USB 3.0 style drive. I had no problem transferring both large files taking several minutes and many many smaller files in large batches back and forth between PC and drive. I was able to backup and restore a drive image via Macrium Reflect on this drive, and also a Macrium Reflect File and Folder Backup and Restore. I was also able to successfully use this drive as external storage space for an Xbox One console. All in all a very handy backup and storage device with enough useable space (3.6 TB) to handy a variety of storage demands.

Like most of the small form factor portable hard drives, its powered by the usb cable so you don't need two cables. Its a spinning HDD not a SSD but thats expected here at this size and price point. I specifically use mine as a backup drive so its only plugged in when I need to move data to it. Mine was 4TB which shows as 3.63TB formatted in Windows 10. The encryption software is on the root of the disk drive and supports 256-bit AES encryption which is pretty standard these days. You don't have to use the encryption if you have no need to encrypt the drive or prefer other software to do so. Its not encrypted out of the box. Drive spins right up, mounts, and writes/reads data with no issues. Few pros and cons based on my recent usage. Pros: Small Form factor USB 3.0 Powered by usb cable 4TB (3.63TB formatted in Windows 10) Quite Comes with encryption software for Windows and Mac Cons: Gets pretty hot when reading/writing to for extended time I've had good luck with hard drives from Western Digital in the past and I expect the same quality out of this drive. Its overall a nice little drive and I get that security knowing that my data is backed up.

When I saw the option to receive and review this drive, I had it in my head that it was a thunderbolt model. No idea where that came from other than wishful thinking. I was imagining plugging it into my phone to copy files! That would have been awesome! It's not thunderbolt. I would hope by now that there were more thunderbolt portable drives by now, but I digress. It is USB 3.0 which still increases speed for reading, writing, and transferring. When copying a 2+ GB video file, it only took a few seconds to copy the entire file The copy dialog box showed that it was transferring at 120MB per second. That's certainly fast enough for me! And with 4TB of space, there's more than enough room to store just about anything I need it to. It could hold almost 2000 video files that are 2GB. It's can back up files from multiple computers with ease! Other than my initial silliness in expecting it to be what it wasn't, I'm very pleased with the speed and capacity of this Western digital drive! I will be able to back up and transfer most anything I want with this high capacity very quickly!

I got this Passport external hard drive because we were shutting down an old computer and buying a new. We are old fashioned and have many documents, pictures and videos on our computer as opposed to having them on a cloud. We needed something that we could use to transfer all our stuff from one computer to the new one fairly easy and quickly. The Passport hard drive was easy to set up on the old computer and very user friendly in showing us how to download the our files to the external hard drive. We set up our new computer and connected the external hard drive and within 15 minutes we had all of our files on the new computer. It was very painless and very quick procedure. If you are looking for a device to store or transfer large amount of files in a quick and easy way, I highly recommend this Passport hard drive.

Large capacity, nice speed with a small footprint.

The Western Digital My Passport portable hard drive is an effective and simple drive for occasional backups. In my use case, I back up my computer data every few weeks and store the drive in a fireproof safe. The drive works right out of the box so there is no need to set up the WD software and encryption if you don't want to, however I would still recommend doing so. The WD software allows you to schedule backups and enable the encryption and it is equally as simple to setup. Transfer speeds are a little better than other USB3 portable drives I have but the limiting factor is the 5400rpm mechanical drive. The case is small and attractive, even if it feels a bit on the cheap plastic side.

The Western Digital My Passport 4TB drive is another in a line of consumer facing portable USB hard drives from WD intended for storage and backup purposes. This drive packs a stunning 4TB of capacity into the package that I've come to get used to that is rated for USB 3.0 speeds. The hard drive features hardware encryption which means that none of the data on the drive can be used or recovered by anyone else, even if they gain physical control of your drive. This in many times is not the case with computing machines which feature a method by which someone could gain access to the OS via some convoluted forgot or reset password mechanism. Lost or stolen, your data is secure - which in turn increases the likelihood that you will practice good computing hygiene by actually backing it up on some media which may have a greater likelihood of going out of your direct control. The drive is literally plug and play. Power and data go over the USB cable so only one connection is required between the drive and your PC. The USB cable is included in the package with the drive and is blue at the USB connector (so genuine USB 3.0). The drive is quiet, though needing to say this reveals that the drive is of the spinning platter type, an HDD and not a SDD. As a result, while this is a USB 3.0 drive, I suspect transfer speeds will be limited by the 5400 rpm drive itself, rather than the connection interface. The drive has some files preloaded. The major one, aside from the manual is the WD Discovery app. This is what lets you set a drive password. Once you do this, you will need to use the app to unlock the drive each time it is connected to a machine before use. Not a big deal, but also not obvious or presented to you upon connecting the drive so many may forget or not realize that they don't have the benefit of the hardware encryption enabled. Running a benchmark test shows about 115 MB/s sequential read and write speeds. USB 3.0 allows up to 5Gb/s which translates to 635MB/s so clearly, speed is limited by the drive itself. WD's utilities can configure and manage doing backups for you but I prefer to let schedule and let Windows handle it. Doing this raises some conflict as Windows would like to be able to auto backup when the drive is connected which means not having the hardware encryption enabled! Speaking of Windows, it is unclear to me whether Mac users will also see the same utilities available on the drive when they plug it in to their machines. In fact, it is likely they do not since those utilities are on the single formatted drive which uses up the entire rated capacity. As a drive, it works well. Transfered data to and from the drive, albeit slower than some of my thumb drives which are themselves getting pretty large in size (500GB). A backup scheduled with Windows worked well. The drive actually works. But, you won't get the full USB 3.0 speed. The drive actually supports USB 2.0 so you can use it with older machines. That has a maximum transfer rate of around 60MB/s so the max transfer is about twice the USB 2.0 speed. But with USB 3.0 and USB C (which is typically USB 3.x or thunderbolt) available, I don't understand why a consumer would go for a slower option. And not only is this option slower, it quite frankly is not a reliable medium for portable data storage. Spinning drives are best used and kept relatively immobile. This is because they are subject to dust, shock, and damage from magnets. Placing them in a fully sealed enclosure helps and the size of this drive makes it such that heat is unlikely to become an issue. But that doesn't solve the shock issue and these drives can be damaged from what seems like a relatively minor amount of shock - especially an amount that one would expect from something portable and of a size that some could fit into your pocket. Despite being portable, you don't want to toss this into a bag or have it bounce around though that's relatively safe with the drive unpowered. While the included cable is relatively short, ensuring that you will keep the drive on the same desk or surface as the machine you're using, you will still want to be careful about moving it around on said surface - again to avoid shock. From what I can tell, the drive doesn't have accelerometers or other sensors which detect impending shock and park the drive head to prevent disc damage. So, what will happen is that inevitably, unless one doesn't actually use this in a portable fashion, it will inevitably get damaged under normal use! Sure, it comes with a 3 year warranty, but there's very limited chance of recovery if you set a hardware encryption password, which you'd then need to provide to WD or some third party to try and recover your data and if you used this as storage and not backup for some other device, you may not have a chance at recovering that data at all. Certainly, SSDs can fail but they inherently have no moving parts which makes them much more robust for a consumer facing portable drive. I think in 2019, if you're going to sell a spinning drive as portable storage, it needs to have features that ensure long term longevity with normal use in addition to the ability to secure your data.

This drive is fantastic for larger files or backing up another computer.

I've used a lot of external drives over the years, and this is by far the fastest to I've owned to date! I was able to transfer all my pictures (over 3tb) to this hard drive and edit, find duplicates and do general clean up with no lag! I really couldn't tell the difference between it and an internal drive! I haven't needed the encryption features yet, but I did explore them and the interface is easy and intuitive.

I feared about not backing up my data on a regular basis. On a Geek Squad visit, the tech advised that my backups could be scheduled to occur automatically by the purchase of this external portable hard drive. It's been scheduled to backup, but thankfully, I haven't had to use that function yet.

This 4GB Western Digital portable hard drive makes an excellent travel companion or if desk space is at a premium. The USB 3 connection is plenty fast for transferring files to and from your computer. It makes an excellent backup solution and provides encryption as well if you need/want it. Western Digital has an excellent history and I have no issues with trusting my critical files to this drive.

It's super simple to use. Transfers videos, videogames and images easily and quickly. Password encryption means I have some peace of mind if it were to go missing. The only negative I can find is the cable that goes in the hard drive is from prior to micro USB so if I lost the cable I'd have to buy a new one. I received this product in part for my review.

This product has been great to work with, and stores all the data I need!