I am old enough to remember some pretty old tech. I didn’t have to work with the big tape reels, but there were the cassette tape era that co-existed with the floppy disk era. I had the 20MB (yes you read right) HDD. I handled a 1GB HDD that came with it’s own dedicated power supply. So it is a little mind boggling to be holding a WD My Passport 6TB and looking back at the pace of progress.
First Impressions
The 6TB edition of the WD My Passport is the largest capacity available on the market in the 2.5″ form factor at the moment.
The design language has been pretty standardised for the My Passport series. Measuring in at just a shade over 20mm high, 100mm long and 70mm wide. It is a little larger, particularly in height, than just a bare bones 2.5″ drive but not hugely so.
Instead of just a black monolith, this one has a robin egg blue upper and the diagonal pattern to give it some visual.
As has been the case forever, it comes with a microUSB 3.0 port, which if you have been living under a rock, is like a microUSB with an addition to the side.
In Use
A drive is a drive is a drive right?
The My Passport showed up just as I was getting ready to transition laptops. Despite having plenty of NAS storage, there is always the inevitable build up of files and detritus on a hard drive. In particular I have a number of virtual machine images which are essential to my work and consume plenty of local drive space.
Having the My Passport turn up for fortune because instead of a host to host transition via SMB, or via the NAS, I could just dump everything onto the My Passport and bring it over to the new machine.
With about 180GB of virtual machine images, Windows was calculating about 96 to 103 Mb/sec sustained transfer rate to the My Passport. Reading from the drive was sustaining about 105 Mb/sec.
Taking the benchmark approach with USBDeview, it was peaking at 95.95 Mb/sec write and 110.70 Mb/sec read.
These figures are pretty respectable particularly for a mechanical drive. Speaking of which, we are so used to flash drives that here is a reminder that mechanical drives needs a little time to spin up.
Other Features
The My Passport comes with the WD Discovery software which can be installed from the drive itself. WD Discovery is an umbrella for three other utilities which needs their own installer package download and installation.
- Acronis
- WD Drive Utilities
- WD Security
Acronis is a backup software that gives you ability to backup the entire machine, partition or individual folders and files. There is a five-year license via redemption, which is download and installation of the software within 90 days of purchase of compatible drive or 31 December 2025 whichever is earlier.
The WD Drive Utilities gives you the tools to scan the drive health, secure erase the drive and two basic settings – sleep timer on the platter and LED control.
WD Security allows you to encrypt the drive with a password. The drive has 256 bit AES hardware encryption capability. With the WD Security software you can set the password and whether the drive will automatically unlock for your username on your machine.
Gripes
There’s little to complain about, given that it’s a portable drive. My one thought is that I wish the cable is a USB-C rather than USB-A.
The five-year Acronis license is likely to catch people out when they most need it.
Conclusions
A short and snappy review for a change. The WD My Passport 6TB has been a real time saver for my laptop transition. There is plenty of capacity for me to backup everything with plenty to spare.
Just for peace of mind I also made an image using the Acronis software because why not? There is disk space galore and if I did really mess up and forgot to copy something off, I can always restore it.
At this capacity, it is not a bad thing to have a couple as backup targets for the disaster recovery scenario.
The 6TB WD My Passport retails for $299.00 MSRP and are available from any tech reseller worth their salt.
DRN would like to thank WD for providing the review unit.
