WD My Passport external hard drive 2TB review: Strong performer

Western Digital has been launching external hard drives in the Indian market at a regular pace. Now they are out with another external HDD. WD My Passport external hard drive 2020 is the latest entrant in the Indian market. This drive is not an SSD, but a regular spindle driven external storage. We got it over to our benchmarking stables and this what we could make of the new storage device.

Design

Let’s quickly get the design and form factor out of the way. The WD My Passport external hard drive is simple yet modern to look at. Available in 3 colours Black, Red and Blue, we got the latter to review. The front face has the WD branding and wave-like pattern running on it, which makes it look like the seashore. The top side of the external HDD has the USB Type-B port and also has the tiny LED light. The rear is black in colour and the same wave pattern can be found on it. It comes with a USB 3.0 cable for faster data transfer capability.

WD My Passport Performance

The WD My Passport external hard drive is available in multiple storage options. These include 1TB, 2TB and 5TB. We got the 2TB version, which is a good space for people who do a lot of graphical work or store a lot of data. Since we edit a lot of videos in 4K, a large external HDD like this one makes perfect sense.

So, we quickly put the WD My Passport external hard drive to the test. We ran HD Tune benchmark on it and we were pleasantly surprised by it. We got read speed of 243MB/s and write speed of 216MB/s. Further, we transferred a 2GB file to the drive from our PC in under 8 seconds using the supplied 3.0 cable via a USB 3.1 port. This is not bad at all.

Over that, the WD My Passport external hard drive comes with WD Discovery software. With this, users can password protect the external hard drive and also turn on/off the LED on the drive. WD My Passport external hard drive uses AES-256-bit hardware encryption. Users can also do automatic backups by adding the backup software to the fray, supplied by WD in the discovery app.

Verdict

At Rs 5,399 the WD My Passport external hard drive might seem like an expensive option at first. But with the kind of safety features, it fetches with it and also the quick speeds along with extreme portability this drive is worth the shiny penny. However, there are external SSD’s now coming at one fourth the storage size of this one for similar pricing but gives 4-6X faster read and write speeds. That might hurt Western Digital business for this drive. Nevertheless, if you are looking for a lot of space and good reliability from an external hard drive, then WD My Passport external hard drive is a good option to go for. Over that, the company is giving 3 years warranty on this drive.

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