WD My Passport 2TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive Review

Free Space and Final Thoughts

Taking a look at the capacity of the WD My Passport 2TB USB 3.0 portable hard drive we see that in Windows, there is 1.81 TB available to the user as reported by Windows. This is with the applications and folders that WD shipped with on the drive. The WD software and users guides take up about 185 MB of space.

The Western Digital My Passport series of portable hard drives have been around for over five years and are a brand that is recognized and trusted around the world. When you want to backup your critical data you want a name and product that you can trust and WD certainly fits those requirements. You also get a product that has been through several revision changes to make it better and the drive that we have here today is proof of that. WD has engineered the plastic housing to be more scratch resistant and placed a finish on it that helps hide fingerprints. You also have larger capacities available and of course SuperSpeed USB 3.0 that is backwards compatible
with USB 2.0. If you have one of the original My Passport hard drives that is around five years old you might want to consider upgrading to one that is newer, larger and faster.

If you have USB 3.0 support you’ll see the performance numbers that we showed you in the review and they are impressive. We also tested this drive on the USB 2.0 header to see if it worked and how the performance was. We had no issues running the WD My Passport 2TB USB 3.0 portable hard drive on the USB 2.0 header although we found much slower performance numbers. The sequential read speeds was 39 MB/s and the sequential write speeds were 33 MB/s. These speeds are not that bad for a high-speed USB 2.0 interface, but are a far cry from what you can get on the USB 3.0 header. Just switching over to the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 port we saw the performance numbers jump up to 114 MB/s read and 113 MB/s write. The write performance of the drive saw a 3.4x increase and that means your backup or file transfer will complete that much faster!

When it comes to pricing the WD My Passport external hard drives range in price from $89.99 to $199.99 depending on the capacity and the color that you would like.

WD My Passport Portable Hard Drive Pricing for Midnight Black:

• WD My Passport 500GB – $89.99 shipped
• WD My Passport 750GB – $94.99 shipped
• WD My Passport 1TB – $116.53 shipped
• WD My Passport 1.5TB – $147.00 Shipped
• WD My Passport 2TB – $199.99 shipped

As you can see the 2TB version that we tested today is $200 and the most expensive of the bunch. If you need a drive this large then you have no choice, but if you are backing up a system that has a smaller drive or less data you can save some money and get a smaller capacity. All of these drive prices aren’t bad considering that they are all cheaper than what a data recovery service charges if you need to send in a failed drive for disaster recovery services. This price also includes the hard drive, external USB 3.0 housing, a USB 3.0 cable and the backup software. Not a bad deal for a very inexpensive way to backup your critical data! Western Digital told us that research studies have shown that the item most missed if ever lost or stolen is one’s computer data. That is pretty shocking considering how upset people get when they lose money, jewelry and other valuables.

The My Passport series is backed by a three year warranty in Asia Pacific region and two years in the rest of the world. The warranty starts from the purchase date on your original sales receipt, so be sure to keep that handy and register the drive the day it arrives with the software that comes on the drive.

We have no issues with this product and highly recommend it to someone that wants to try out a cost effective way to backup all of your personal data! Spending a little money now will help you be able to protect your marriage photos or the video you made of the birth of your child and those are priceless bits of data. If you plan on traveling with this drive you might want to look into the WD Nomad Rugged Case for an extra layer of protection.

Legit Bottom Line: Western Digital brings consumers peace of mind by allowing you to backup a ton of data in a small compact device that will fit in your pocket with the My Passport 2TB USB 3.0 portable external drive!