WD My Passport 5TB Portable Hard Drive Review

Setup & WD Software

All you have to do to get started with the WD My Passport drive is to plug it into an open USB port on your computer. Once plugged in we can see that the drive has 4.54 TB of usable space.

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The drive should just pop-up in Windows Explorer. When you open it you’ll notice installers for WD Discovery for both Windows and Mac. I would suggest running the installer if you plan to take full advantage of the drive and WD’s backup software.

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Once Discovery is installed it will show up in your taskbar. When you click on it, it will bring up a list of your connected drives. You actually have the option to Import your data from your cloud storage (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) or social media accounts to your drive. You’ll notice a small gear next to each drive you have connected. Clicking it will allow you to turn the LEDs on the drive on or off, set a password for the drive, and eject the drive.

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There is another tab called “Apps”. There you’ll find options to install WD Drive Utilities, WD Security, and WD Backup.

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The WD Drive Utilities has three tabs which are “Diagnose”, “Settings”, and “Drive Erase”. Under Diagnose you can run a drive status check, a quick drive test, and a complete drive test. In Settings you can set the sleep time on or off and set the time for when the drive will turn off. You can also set the LEDs on the drive to be on or off. Finally Drive Erase is what you think it is, a way to erase your drive. You have the option to format to NTFS or exFAT.

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WD Backup is a very simple application that allows you to create backups. What is great is that you can select different folders and you can set a schedule so your data is automatically backed up.

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WD Security allows you to set a password for each of your connected WD drives. You can also enable auto-unlock for your computer, which is nice as entering a password every time can be a little annoying.

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