Western Digital, a high-profile name in hard drives, has recently launched its redesigned My Passport portable external hard drives in India. Currently, this drive is available in three variants – 1TB, 2 TB & 4TB capacity. These variants have MRP of Rs. 7980, 11910 and 17140, respectively. We have been provided with 3TB variant of hard drive for review purpose which is currently not available in India. Except for the capacity of 3TB of My Passport, rest of the features are same and hence you can consider the observations made in this review for making your purchase decision.
In the box, you will get portable drive, USB cable and quick install guide. As its name suggests, My Passport hard drive is very compact and the size of a passport. It can be easily carried and you can tuck it comfortably even in your pocket also. This drive comes in four vivid colors – Black, Red, White and Blue. We have got Red color drive for review purpose and it looks quite stylish. It is made of high quality plastic and half portion on the front and back has shining look whereas the half portion has texttured design which gives it distinctive look. The shining portion can be susceptible to smudges and fingerprints. It has sharp edges on all the corners which may prove to be little bit irrritant when carrying in your palm.
This drive incorporate hardware protection feature with 256-bit AES encryption. This feature is very useful from the security point of view. You can store the content/ data on it which is encrypted and their is no chance at all to get it stolen.
This drive comes with a USB cable that is compatible with USB 3.0 connectivity and offers faster transfer speeds compared to the older USB 2.0. The plus point of this drive is that its port and cable are also compatible with USB 2.0 and will be compatible with older version of devices also. This drive is compatible with Windows 7 onwards running devices and for Macs, it will have to be reformatted.
Once you plug in this device with your laptop, the recognition time of the drive is quite fast. The write and read speed of this drive is also very fast and is your ideal companion to transfer large files on this high capacity drive. It is very simple procedure to configure the drive when connected to your device.
For PC usage, you will get three software applications – WD Drive Utilities, WD Security and SmartWare. For using them, you will have to install them on your device or if you wish, you can ignore them and use the drive the way you like. But these are very useful features and you will be compelled to use the. For instance, SmartWare makes copies of your files and allows you to back up your files to your drive or to cloud service such as Dropbox. The cloud storage feature gives you a secondary level of protection for your vast date stored which is not available in low capacity portable drives.
With WD Utilities, you can run diagnostic tests for checking your drive for errors and also prevents drive failures from occuring. The WD Security feature has been provided for password protection and data encryption. The beauty of these features is that these software are user-friendly and very easy to use.
My Passport portable drive has vast capacities from 1TB to 4TB and you can store large amount of videos, photos and other files and content. It has cloud storage feature which will prove very useful in the event of loss of data under any circumstances. This drive comes with password and encrypted features and come with 2 years limited warranty. If you are planning to buy portable drive with huge capacity then you can definitely consider this drive.
You can buy My Passport external hard drives from Amazon.in
