When it comes to buying portable hard disks, people tend to research quite extensively. And that makes sense, as portable HDDs are generally used to backup large amount of digital content for an extended period of time.
Even though factors like price and storage capacity are important, more and more manufacturers these days are offering extra features like data encryption to make their products stand out from the crowd. Add to it goodies like attractive designs and cloud storage, and the competition in the digital storage space only gets fiercer.
That's precisely the strategy Western Digital seems to have followed with the 2016 version of its My Passport portable hard disk. The recently launched My Passport 2016 has everything from a fresh design to strong encryption, all encased in a compact looking device.
The new WD My Passport 2016 is available in four storage capacities - 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB. We decided to test the 3TB variant (surprisingly the only one not available in India) out. So, should this be your next portable hard drive? Read the rest of our review to find out.
Design and build quality
With sharp edges, the new WD My Passport 2016 has a square-like shape. It's available in six colour variants - Black, White, Blue, Red, Orange and Yellow. As compared to its predecessor, the new hard disk is also a bit bulkier.
While the top half of the new WD My Passport 2016 has a glossy finish with the WD logo embedded in the centre, the lower half has a textured matte finish. The revamped look is the result of Western Digital's collaboration with designer Yves Behar's Fuseproject.
During the course of our testing, we found the design and build quality of the My Passport 2016 to be quite attractive. That said, it seems a little delicate and thus, prone to physical damage. With a USB 3.0 port and an LED indicator, the drive comes with a matching-coloured USB cable.
Software and Performance
As mentioned before, the new WD My Passport 2016 comes with a couple of nifty features. It has three pre-configured software utilities, as mentioned below with their functionalities.
WD Drive Utilities - It consists of basic tools and configuration options like Diagnosis (for checking hard disk health) and Settings (having options such as secure data deletion).
WD Backup - It allows backing up of files from the PC. Here, you can choose whether you want to backup local data directly to the My Passport or to cloud storage services like Dropbox. What's even better is that you can schedule automatic backups.
WD Security - It can be used to secure personal data with user-specified password. A 'return-if-found' can be configured to prompt up if the drive is stolen and data access is tried. The major feature is obviously the built-in AES 256 encryption.
With these utilities, we found backing up and securing data to be a hassle-free experience.
To check the performance, we ran a few benchmark tests on the My Passport 2016 and found the results to be quite decent. The minimum transfer rate is around 50.6MB/s, while the maximum rate reaches about 120.5MB/s.
With an access time of about 23.6ms, the performance is quite nice. This is quite nice, especially considering the big storage capacity. We didn't encounter any major heating issues either, although the spinning of the disk does cause it to make a little noise when transferring large-sized files.
Design and build quality
With sharp edges, the new WD My Passport 2016 has a square-like shape. It's available in six colour variants - Black, White, Blue, Red, Orange and Yellow. As compared to its predecessor, the new hard disk is also a bit bulkier.
While the top half of the new WD My Passport 2016 has a glossy finish with the WD logo embedded in the centre, the lower half has a textured matte finish. The revamped look is the result of Western Digital's collaboration with designer Yves Behar's Fuseproject.
Software and Performance
As mentioned before, the new WD My Passport 2016 comes with a couple of nifty features. It has three pre-configured software utilities, as mentioned below with their functionalities.
WD Drive Utilities - It consists of basic tools and configuration options like Diagnosis (for checking hard disk health) and Settings (having options such as secure data deletion).
WD Backup - It allows backing up of files from the PC. Here, you can choose whether you want to backup local data directly to the My Passport or to cloud storage services like Dropbox. What's even better is that you can schedule automatic backups.
WD Security - It can be used to secure personal data with user-specified password. A 'return-if-found' can be configured to prompt up if the drive is stolen and data access is tried. The major feature is obviously the built-in AES 256 encryption.
To check the performance, we ran a few benchmark tests on the My Passport 2016 and found the results to be quite decent. The minimum transfer rate is around 50.6MB/s, while the maximum rate reaches about 120.5MB/s.
With an access time of about 23.6ms, the performance is quite nice. This is quite nice, especially considering the big storage capacity. We didn't encounter any major heating issues either, although the spinning of the disk does cause it to make a little noise when transferring large-sized files.
Verdict
The new Western Digital My Passport 2016 is a really nice option for those who have to backup large amounts of data frequently. It looks good and the overall performance is satisfactory. That said, we feel it could've been made a bit more durable and the pricing is also a bit on the higher side.
Those looking at alternatives can go for the Seagate Backup Plus or Transcend StoreJet.
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