Pat PilcherSummary
WD My Passport 6TB Portable Hard Drive
This wee beaut is a great travel companion but will also handle those daily or less regular backup chores with aplomb, writes PAT PILCHER.
$299
It might seem counter-intuitive, but I still use an old-school mechanical hard drive to back up and keep copies of my data, even though I have much faster external SSDs. The big reason for this is simple economics. Mechanical hard drives offer huge amounts of capacity at a price point per gigabyte, which is far more affordable than an SSD of comparable capacity.
Of course, this is old news to WD’s engineers, who have crafted the impossible: squeezing a Tardis-like 6TB onto a tiny 2.5″ notebook hard drive, which is neatly enclosed in a pocketable USB-friendly case.
The drive sits inside a tough outer plastic case and has a black top and grey underside. It can also be had with a white, red, blue, or black top. The only real disappointment to its otherwise functional and well-executed design is the stingy bundled 18-inch cable, which has a USB-A plug on one and an e-sata connector on the other. Eighteen inches is long enough to be useable but impractical enough to be annoying. The WD My Passport is built like a brick shithouse and should survive a global thermonuclear war. Compared to portable SSDs, which often feel insubstantial and flimsy, the drive packs some reassuring heft and feels as if it has been built to last.
It comes with both PC and Mac utilities. WD Security allows you to set up and manage 256-bit AES hardware-level encryption. It’s a simple app but one that could come in very handy. The other Windows utility is Acronis True Image, which is ideal for backing up and cloning drives.
The 6TB My Passport drive is nowhere near as quick as an external SSD, it’s no slouch and is capable of 5Gbps burst transfers. Sustained transfers are slower, but at this price per GB, who’s complaining? The drive is pocketable and packs a whopping 6TB of capacity, which means it’s ideal for backing large chunks of data off PCs, NAS drives and other tasks where both capacity and portability are a must.
For streaming media, the 6TB drive worked like a charm. Having your entire library of movies/TV shows in your pocket is a real boon when travelling as most airlines – looking at you, Air New Zealand – offer shows and movies already stale a decade ago. The 4K random reads were slow (0.3MBps to 0.4MBps), but in use, I had no issue streaming content off the drive onto my SurfaceBook PC. Its super petite form factor meant that finding it a place in my laptop bag wasn’t a huge ask either.
If speed is of the essence, and you can afford it, you’ll probably be better off using an SSD, a good solution for smaller amounts of frequently accessed data. That said, backups are vital so a large capacity mechanical hard disk for any big piles of data you access infrequently is also a must-have. Background scheduled backup tasks are also an ideal solution for copying large piles of data from SSDs onto slower mechanical drives.
Priced at a wallet/purse-pleasing $299 for the 6TB version (a 2TB version is also available), the 6TB My Passport drive offers a sizeable amount of storage at an extremely compelling price point. In short, anyone wanting to back up a growing multimedia library, their PC, Mac, or NAS needs to look closely at this wee wonder, which offers compelling value for money.
