Customer Ratings & Reviews

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.

Bought this a few uears ago. Very easy to operate , great storage capacity, nice and sleak design. Worth the money .

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.

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

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!

Fast and data saving storage box that is easy to use with a sleek design and very size compatible.

Outstanding product and just what I needed! And service install was excellent.

WD drives are always my go-to harddrives. This one can be used as any ordinary external HDD, but this one is geared more for being used as a backup drive, which is works well for. When you plug in the drive, it has executables for Mac and Windows to install "WD Discovery". This is what allows you to enable the encryption, and backup from your cloud services. You can also install the other WD utility apps. They all seem to work well, and is a great way to keep your data safe. You should always save your most important data in multiple locations, including "onsite" and "offisite". This drive will help you accomplish that.

Outstanding product for storage of pictures and large documents

works great. took me a bit to figure out the cloud service, but once I got signed it everything was easy! I use this to back up files for my job!

Love the color, allows me to identify which external hard drive is which.

Works very well as external storage for Xbox Series X

Tends to be a bit slow when starting up but functions well otherwise.

Perfect Just what I wanted Bruce installed . And I received excellent service.

Was cool but slow and outdated good for small stuff

Good portable hard drive but not what we needed for

I bought WD passport of this model in 2020. I just used two times for pictures storage. Recently I found it was not recognized by computer. Checked with BestBuy, the BestBuy young girl was really nice and tried her best to solve the problem. But finally failed to get it recovered. She asked me to contact manufacture as BestBuy is only a seller and isn't responsible for any product problem. I lost all my files in my Passport, really a disaster for my job and my family!!! Never recommend this product!