Final Thoughts
The WD My Passport gives you everything you want out of a portable drive. It is super small, you can easily fit this drive in your pocket, actually you could probably fit two in your pocket. The small size is also great for creators on the go, I know many creators who live out of their backpacks so the size of the My Passport SSD is great for them. The drive has a single cable, and does not require external power. This means you only need to bring one cable with you. WD has also made the drive compatible with Type-A ports with the included Type-C to Type-A adapter. This drive is also very fast, it is going to be faster than a normal external drive, or flash drive.
But is the fastest portable drive out there? No it is not. Looking at our results both the Samsung SSD T5 and ADATA SE730H are faster. The big difference between all of the drives we’ve tested is the actual drive (controller and NAND) inside the drive. Based on our results we can see that the WD My Passport SSD’s components are what is holding it back, especially when it comes to writing smaller files to the drive. This is definitely something you want to consider if you are a photographer and plan to be transferring a lot of files at once.
Looking at prices of the drive, the 1TB version of the WD My Passport SSD is $339 at our favorite online retailer, whereas the Samsung SSD T5 is only $10 more at $349. I really believe that the $10 extra is worth the added performance that the SSD T5. The one thing that the My Passport SSD does have over the Samsung drive is software, you actually get free backup software with the My Passport SSD.
I think that the WD My Passport SSD is an excellent portable solid state drive, but based on its performance it needs to be priced lower to compete with Samsung’s SSD T5. Overall ThinkComputers gives to WD My Passport SSD an 8 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Small and compact size
– Fast transfer speeds (compared to normal drives)
– Uses a single cable
– Great software package from WD
Cons:
– Slower write speeds with smaller files
– Slower than Samsung’s SSD T5
– Needs to be priced more competively
