While the My Passport for Mac might be your typical standard 2.5-inch hard drive, it’s designed to play nicely with Apple OS X’s file system from the get go. Of course, that’s just reducing it.
Western Digital or WD as it is commonly called is a house hold name when it comes to storage products. From the old full size external hard drives, cloud connected drives to the present day 2.5″ Passport sized drives, the company has a product for everyone. With the colorful new My Passport refresh, WD seems to be aiming at a more youthful demographic. Read on for the review where we’ll talk about both the design element as well as the drive performance. Design As we saw with in our, it is quite evident that design is fast becoming a premier element for a product that has traditionally been just a spinning drive in a black box. Designed by Yves Behar, the design is quite unlike anything else on the market. You wouldn’t mind this hard drive lying around the living room.
With the 2016 edition My Passport drives, WD is giving their already good-looking and slim portable drives a complete makeover. Dressed up in pastel shades and chunky designs, the My Passport drive almost looks like a lego brick from afar. The chunky feel makes sure that it is very grippy and looks really unique albeit a bit thicker than the competition.There’s a two-tone gradient on the face of the drive that further accentuates design. The parts are segregated by matte and glossy finishes with the latter being a fingerprint and smudge magnet. Unfortunately, we see this getting scratched really quickly. The drive isn’t the slimmest around but with 3 terabytes of storage on board, it is hard to find fault with this.
Compared to a previous generation 1TB WD My Passport Ultra and a 2TB Transcend drive, you’ll observe that the new 2016 edition My Passport drive sits right between the two. WD has clearly paid a lot of attention to detail as is evident in the rubber feet built into the lower half of the drive. This allows you to place it conveniently on a desk without fear of it slipping off. Additionally, it’ll lift up the glossy surface ensuring it doesn’t get scratched. Performance The hard drive interfaces over USB 3.0 and so theoretically has a maximum transfer rate of 5gbps but that of course does not correspond to real life performance. We performed a series of hard drive benchmarks on the WD My Passport 3TB and pitted it against some other drives like the Seagate Ultra 1TB, Transcend StoreJet 2Tb and WD Ultra 1TB. Since hard drives perform very differently when you are transferring multiple smaller files versus larger single files, we accounted for both when performing our read / write speed tests.
In Crystal Mark, the new WD My Passport 3TB scored amongst the highest speeds in our test bench. With a simulated mixed file transfer load of 4GB, the My Passport drive achieved write speeds of 121.7Mbps and read speeds of 120.4Mbps.
![My passport for mac on pc My passport for mac on pc](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125504565/389192104.jpg)
This is well ahead of our previous generation WD Drive that achieved 89 and 88.61 Mbps respectively on the benchmark. The Seagate drive performs rather poorly in contrast with write speeds of just 30.46Mbps.
We performed a similar test in the HD Tune benchmark as well where the simulated file transfer size was 2 Gigabytes for the read and write tests. Once again, the WD My Passport 3TB drive performed well with write speeds touching 120Mbps and read speeds of 115Mbps. The healthy speed boost on both parameters suggests that the latest drives would be a good upgrade for someone running an older hard drive. Across our tests, we observed that the latest generation of My Passport drives are amongst the fastest in both read and write speeds. Yes, in read speeds, the Seagate Ultra often overtook the My Passport however the difference is minimal.
Additionally the poor write speeds when placed against the My Passport 3TB make the Seagate drive a non starter. Miscellaneous A color coordinated USB cable ships in the box alongside a range of software. These range from back up utilities to encryption software however you’ll be better served by more robust third-party software. The drive ships formatted in the NTFS file system but formatting to exFAT is quick and painless and will allow you to use the drive on both Windows and Mac. Conclusion It is impressive to see innovation in the storage industry and the My Passport drive is a testament to that. A 3 TB drive in such a form factor would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago but such is the pace of technology. The My Passport 3TB (2016) is one of the fastest spinning disk portable drives around.
While not the most compact, it’ll easy fit any bag and most pockets too unless you opt for skinny jeans! For most of us, we’re stuck on spindle based drives till the time terabyte class SSDs become affordable. Keeping that in mind, the WD My Passport range offers tremendous value. The range starts at Rs. 7,980 for the 1TB drive and goes up to 17,140 for the 4TB drive.
Gone were the days when we are satisfied with the memory of a floppy disk. When I was in elementary I used to have those floppy disks to store my important files for my class. And I was satisfied with it.
Years passed, we started to have 1 GB, 2GB, 4GB flash drives. Now, we even have external hard drives. It started with,. Now we even have and even!
(Check the price of WD My Passport external hard drives here: ) Even desktop hard drives improved. The latest now is even! Maybe for some, they think we can never use up all of these memory. But as a blogger, I disagree. I use to have a laptop with a really old model. It has a very low memory capacity. I told myself I’m going to have to purchase an external hard drive to transfer all of the photos I took during events, etc.
But I never got to purchase one. Now, all of my treasured photos and files were gone. Imagine the heartbreak I felt. Just because I don’t have a drive where I can store all of those files, all those years of memories were gone.
This is where I decided, its enough. I need enough capacity. Now, I have a WD My Passport for Mac with 2TB. Specifications:. System Compatibility. Formatted HFS+ J for Mac OS X Yosemite, Mavericks or Mountain Lion (I tried it on Lion and Snow Leopard, its still compatible.). Compatible with Apple Time Machine (Say goodbye to losing your files in Mac, everything is backed up with no hassle.).
Requires reformatting for Windows OS (It only takes around 5 clicks to reformat your passport. Macbook has a pre-installed “Disk Utility” which you can use to reformat your passport.). Models. 1 TB. 2 TB.
3 TB. Interface. USB 3.0 (Up to 5GB/s).
USB 2.0 (Up to 480 MB/s. Dimensions (H x D x W): 4.33in x 0.62in x 3.21in (110mm x 15.84mm x 81.6mm). Weight. 3TB – 0.50lb (0.23kg).
2TB – 0.50lb (0.23kg). 1TB – 0.34lb (0.16kg). Environmental. Operating Temperature: 5ºC to 35ºC. Non-operating Temperature: -20ºC to 65ºC. Warranty – Up to 3 years. Package.
WD My Passport for Mac. USB 3.0 cable. WD Security. WD Drive Utilities. Quick Install Guide. Technical Support and Limited Warranty Guide.
Other features:. WD Security. It offers 256-bit hardware encryption that will help you secure your files. You can also opt to set a password.
Design The WD My Passport for Mac looks classy. The design would really look good when you pair it with your Macbook. It has a textured aluminum finish along the sides and the bottom. On the top, its color is black with the branding “WD My Passport for Mac.” It has a USB 3.0 port and LED indicator on the side. At the bottom of the device, you will again see the branding, the product number and serial number and other product information. For the design, I’m giving the WD My Passport a 5 out of 5 stars. Speed and Performance I tested the WD My Passport on my Macbook 2006.
I used Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and Xbench to test the read and write speed. These two third party apps are the most commonly used apps to test the speed of external and flash drives in Mac. You can use it right away. No set up needed. My Macbook runs uses USB 2.0 interface. Below are the results. Say goodbye to waiting forever just to copy a movie file!
You can now copy and back up large files to your external drive in just a few minutes! For the speed and performance, I’m giving WD My Passport for Mac a score of 5 out 5 stars. Set Up Once you plug it in on your Mac, you would get a prompt if you want to use the drive for your Apple Time Machine back up. You can use your WD My Passport for Mac right away. No set up needed. But if you want install the WD Utilities, the set up is quick and easy.
Just head on the Finder and you will find preinstalled files. Below are the screenshots. Whether you opt to update or not, after the installation, you get this window, Just click on Finish and you are good to go!
My Verdict This My WD My Passport for Mac 7th generation which was released around May 27, 2015 is a must-have for all Macbook users. With its speed, design, and security, My Passport is surely one of the best in the market. The price is quite reasonable and much affordable than the others. (Check the price here: ) Whether you have an old or new Macbook, or even if not, (will need reformatting) it will still work for you and it can still offer you an impressive performance.
Mac user or not, this is certainly the external hard disk drive for you. Pros:. Classy design and sturdy construction. (The built and construction is better than the WD My Passport Ultra.).
Great speed performance. Lower cost than the others.
Security. Textured Aluminum Finish (Looks really great to pair with Macbook.) Cons:. No other colors unlike the WD My Passport Ultra. Overall, WD My Passport for Mac (7th Generation) scored a total of 5 out 5 stars. The Lifestyle Avenue HIGHLY RECOMMENDS WD My Passport for Mac. Do you own a WD My Passport for Mac? How was your experience?
What do you think about its performance? Share them in the comments! About Athena Jeunnesse Mae Tria Athena finished her degree on Bachelor of Arts, Major in Legal Management in the University of Sto. Tomas, Manila, Philippines. She took her primary, secondary, and intermediate studies in Saint Paul College of Makati.
She is a single mom, currently a law student and a full-time Virtual Assistant. She started blogging in 2004 and had her first paid domain in the year 2011. She covered events since early 2012. She loves to write, take pictures, read books, dance, Netflix, anime, and eat. Despite her busy schedule, she finds time for her other interests like PC and console gaming, and livestreaming on Twitch or YouTube.
She also loves a few bottles of beer.;).