Western Digital introduces new My Passport SSD
Western Digital has launched its new range of My Passport SSD portable data storage drives. During a live virtual event Western Digital ANZ senior sales manager Simon Whitford introduced the new range of devices. Aimed at business users, casual users and content creators, the new Western Digital device allows fast access to data from a light and compact portable solid-state drive.
The new My Passport SSD is considerably smaller and lighter than other portable external storage devices, measuring only 9mm x 55mm x 100mm. The palm-sized drive has been designed with soft rounded edges and fits nicely in your bag or pocket.
It's a far cry from the bulky external drives of old. This new drive features fast and on-chip NVMe SSD technology, moving away from the traditional 2.5" hard drive form factor that has dictated enclosure sizes for years.
The stylish-looking, sleek enclosure has a metal top and a plastic underside. It is, apparently, shockproof as well as drop-proof up to 1.98m. But it doesn't really feel that robust. I certainly wouldn't want anyone to stand on it or to drop it on a concrete floor.
The WD My Passport SSD comes in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities and four colours: grey, blue, red and gold. The pack includes cables for both USB Type-A and the newer USB Type-C sockets. The USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSD also works with USB 3.0 and 2.0 devices, for maximum compatibility.
The drive is pre-formatted to the exFAT file system for PC and Mac compatibility. It can be re-formatted and partitioned, as required, for use with other operating systems and file systems. A copy of WD Discovery is pre-loaded on the drive, for Windows and MacOS. As well as monitoring portable drives, the application provides access to further utilities for drive configuration, backups, 256-bit AES hardware encryption and password protection.
The packaging boasts speeds of up to 1050MB/s and, with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 compatible device, these speeds are most defiantly achievable. I tested the drive using CrystalDiskMark 7. The 1TB My Passport SSD Western Digital sent to me for review achieved 1063.83 MB/s read speeds and 1018.99 MB/s write speeds.
This is a fantastic and uncompromising data transfer speed. Users can keep their valuable data with them, yet still access and work on it as if it was stored on an internal hard drive. Content creators will have no trouble editing material directly from the drive.
The My Passport SSD is a fast, stylish portable data storage solution. It's not really that much bigger than a memory stick, but some six times faster and with a much larger storage capacity for our ever-increasing data sizes. Be it for personal back-ups, business data or storage for content creation, the SSD will save you time with the fast transfer speeds.
The My Passport SSD will be available from 30th September in grey with the other colours available later this year.
