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

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!

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.

Backing up your computer is a little like brushing your teeth after eating lunch. Everyone knows it’s a good idea. Just about everyone has the means of doing it. And yet it’s just enough of an inconvenience that virtually no one does. The WD Passport series seeks to use a combination of cost-effective hardware and user friendly software to reduce that inconvenience to one that most people will be willing to improve their bad habits, and this one is no exception. As far as the hardware goes, it’s solid but doesn’t do much to really stand out regarding what you get. Inside the fairly rugged (and heavy) case is a standard 2.5” drive of the same sort you’d find in a laptop plugged into a USB 3.0 interface. I can’t see any evidence of additional shock or vibration protection being used to help combat the problems mechanical drives usually experience when being taken on the go, so a padded carrying case may not be a bad idea if you plan to use it like that. While they get marks for not requiring an external power brick and using a replaceable, non-proprietary cable they lose some ground here for using the Micro B connector to connect the drive rather than the more durable (and ubiquitous) USB-C connection standard. This is particularly annoying for a portable device, as finding one of these cables out in the wild is borderline impossible in most places, so if you lose it your only option will be to substitute a much slower (and less robust) standard micro USB cable in its place. Also, as is typical in these devices, while the interface may be fast the drive it’s connected to is not. Don’t get me wrong, speeds can be pretty good under the right conditions where the drive’s expanded cache can come into play, but at the end of the day you’ve still got a mechanical laptop drive in there. As such it’s probably not a device I’d recommend for uses where a high transfer speed is essential, such as a portable media vault. Fortunately, the unit fares a LOT better when it comes to software. Preloaded on the drive is a pair of install wrappers for Western Digital’s Discovery dashboard – one for Windows and one for Mac. Running them should, ideally, download the latest version of the utility from the internet and install it on your machine (though in my case I found I needed to go to Western Digital’s support website and download it from there before it would actually work.) This then lets you install 3 basic apps: one for backups, another for security management, and one for maintenance and health monitoring of the drive. The utilities aren’t likely to blow anyone away with their feature set, but they’re very simple to use and offer more than the barebones functionality you’ll get with a lot of manufacturers. Once each of these optional programs have been installed you’ll be walked through setting up the most basic features of each such as establishing a backup schedule, setting a password for the drive’s encryption (which is hardware based so as to remove a potential bottleneck created by software encryption utilities), and renaming the primary volume. There’s also an option for turning off the status LED for the drive – something that more backup devices could stand to implement given that usually the best time to pull a backup is at night when the computer’s not in use. There’s also an option to save backups to a cloud service such a Dropbox so you don’t have to worry about bringing the drive with you everywhere. Ultimately, the word I keep coming back to in my head when trying to describe this drive is “effective.” It’s not as rugged or fast as an SSD. It’s not as feature rich or sophisticated as a desktop RAID array or small scale NAS appliance. And it’s not as automatic as a cloud backup service that’s constantly running in the background. But it is inexpensive, easy to use, and big enough to take just about anything you might throw at it. And for most people, that should be enough to meet their needs.

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.

Working well so far. Should be fine until 80% full, then fragmentation takes over and it will slow way down. I keep it in it's packaging when moving it between work and home. I have the 5 GB version too and this smaller drive seems more responsive.