WD - My Passport 4TB External USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive - Black

WD discovery software will only back up to a WD device or cloud service. This is fine if you are just starting out with computers or you decide to buy a large number of WD drives for a project. Within reach, I have seven bus-powered 2.5” external drives, two AC powered 3.5” drives, one 3.5” 4-drive RAID 5 enclosure and a dual-bay 3.5” USB 3.1 drive dock with a stack of 3.5” bare drives. I have a number of other 2.5” bus-powered drives around the house. This is after cleaning house and tossing out old useless drives. ONE of these drives is a WD enclosure. I have no room in my backup toolbox for proprietary software that will only backup to a single brand drive/cloud. The drive is great. I love the size of this drive. All my bus-powered 2.5” drives, including the Passport, are 3” wide. The Passport is just a little shorter and thicker than my other 2.5” enclosures. Overall, looks and feels smaller. This is currently the largest capacity drive I have in this small bus-powered size. Big Bang for the Buck. I promptly reformatted the drive to HFS+, Mac OS Extended. My two windows 10 laptops are covered with several dedicated drives using Macrium Reflect software. I’m shuffling around several other computers/drives and really needed 4GB of pocketable HFS+ storage for Time Machine and SuperDuper. It would have been nice to have a little leatherette sleeve, or a rubber bumper/case included like ALL my other 2.5” enclosures. At first glance I thought there was no activity light on the enclosure, but it is visible when the drive is in use. Unless it is a klunker, a drive is a drive. It works great -until it doesn’t. I can’t speak for longevity of the hardware but I’m really happy with the look and feel of this drive. I skipped the WD Discovery software since it only works with this one drive I own.

Uhhhhh, what is there to say about this......it stores......Of course!. It hooks into my computer....Of course! I may never really use it like I thought I did.....of course! Am I glad I have it.....I mean I bought it!

Great drive... thought it would fail but it was a great purchase. I'll buy another one someday.

I have been building computers for the last twenty five years. WD hard drives have always been the most consistent and stable drives. (I love the new Black SN750.... Really can't say enough good things about that NVME drive...) And I love this My Passport, too. It's not as fast as the ultra options. I know I get slightly faster transfer times from the Seagate Back-Up Plus Ultra Touch. But, that drive also crashed on me a few times and, so far, the My Passport hasn't. It's stable, reliable, and fast enough. For reference, I was able to transfer a 2.5gb file from my desktop hard drive to the back-up in under 5 seconds at an average speed of 117MB/S. My older drives from WD and Seagate performed under 100MB/S, so I definitely feel like this is an upgrade in speed as well as size. The new big feature with this Passport is the AES-256 hardware encryption. I feel like that's a pretty standard feature these days. The software has been updated. It's all very user friendly and the base software is included on the drive or you can download the software from western digital directly. I also tested this drive on an XBOX ONE as an external storage solution, and that may be how I use this drive. My 2 TB Passport was pretty full and this drive works great with the XBOX. All-in-all, I think this is a good drive. It does what it sets out to do well. I haven't had any problems and it's very easy to recommend if you are needing a back-up for work, media, or even as an external drive for an XBOX.

I received the 4 TB drive today. I plugged it into a windows 10 laptop and saw the drive formatted NTFS. Great. I copied a few large folders to the drive and watched performance. The transfers rates are between 2 MB/s to 60 MB/s, which is 16 to 180 mps, far below the advertised 3 gbs. I performed a quick ntfs format of the drive and started another copy. Same thing. This is way too slow compared to my previous 2 TB WD drive. Not sure what is going on. No instructions. Nothing in the installed software to set anything. I shouldn't need to set anything. I will give WD chat support a try before returning to BB.

This is a good drive and the transfer speed is only slightly better than last years version. Simply put, for 2019, this drive underwhelms in features. You lose a transfer light and it is still the same USB 3.0 interface. They did change the outside to get rid of the finger print magnet of the previous model. I am a WD fan but feel that more could have been done to deliver a new product for this year. Essentially the only real difference is the software is updated, you lose the LED light, and the outside is just a little smaller and does not attract finger prints. You can download the newer software from the WD website.

I like using this over the MyBook one. So a while back, like some years ago, the MyBook external hard drive stopped working. Idk how to fix it but I suspect it has something to do with the AC adapter. If you guys want an external hard drive WITHOUT plugging it into the wall, then I recommend this. The world is moving on to solid state drives but there's power in numbers. Those SSDs are kind of pricey and so I wouldn't go for it right now.

Other reviews were correct, that this is great as an external hard drive for PS4. Just plug in and use. I plugged it in, and it asked if I wanted it to format it for PS4 use. Just click yes and it's done. All of the Call of Duty games and updates are so big, that I keep saying it's like being in a real possessive relationship. When you have have those games on your hard drive, you can't have any other games since they take up all the space and time. This external hard drive feels like I got my PS4 back with all of the old games I was able to reload. Also just takes pressure off the system since I was always maxed on data usage.