WD 1TB My Passport Portable External Hard Drive HDD, USB 3.0, USB 2.0 Compatible, Black - WDBYVG0010BBK-WESN

Since I have owned Western Digital hard drives both internally and externally for 15 years, I have bought more than 10 drives. I've only had one hard drive failure in all those years, and that was many years after I got it.

When I got this drive, I was initially impressed. A good job was done on its construction. Passed all self-tests and surface tests in the external testing program. Tests on the surface and full formatting took a normal amount of time for a drive of this size (about 15 hours for full read/write testing). In reality, there was a significant delay in what I was expecting to happen when I began backing up my data to it. The process of backing up all my data normally takes me 20 to 30 hours. (There are about checked to see if it was my computer, or the cable, or the USB port - other drives attached to the same port/cable did not have this issue. Over the course of the backup process, the issue remained the same. I tried rebooting my computer and changing the USB port, but neither was effective. My drive produced no unusual noise or vibration, read speed did not have any effect, and data were written properly.

I tried to update the firmware of my drive, but it did not detect the changes. The WD firmware updater was telling me to disconnect all external devices with the exception of one USB hard drive that I wanted to upgrade, even though there was nothing else attached. There are no options for 5T portable drives right now, and I decided not to spend the time testing and backing up my data on another drive. Finally, whatever problems the drive has, they do not impact data reliability. WD now supplies a new program Documentation was not included with the drive, but on the WD website it says to use WD Discovery to download and manage other WD apps as well as learn about software from other WD business partners. As for the last part, it sounds like a big piece of adware, but out of curiosity I tried to install it under Sandboxie (a virtualized environment to ensure that programs can be uninstalled cleanly). We are unable to install WD discovery because it attempted to install a kernel driver that Sandboxie does not support. It is unclear why a program that claims to assist in the download of other apps would need a kernel driver.

Yousef Pearce

| Apr 16, 2021

There is no justification for the cost addition for going from 4TB to 5TB. There is no need to charge this much for an old-fashioned hard disk drive.

For some reason, this model has no non-slip feet. On top of this, the cheap plastic surface is especially slippery. Therefore, it can slide around on virtually any flat, hard surface like a hockey puck. In all three of my previous My Passport models, the feet are non-slip. WD has sinned seriously here. The software bundled with the device is utter garbage.

Jasmine Kim

| Mar 08, 2021

Unlike other packages, the contents of this one have not been opened or damaged. A NTFS file system was pre-formatted on the drive, and there were MAC and Windows installers included. Before I put the drive to use, I ran the included installer and full WD diagnostics. The drive suddenly stopped working after I used it for backup for less than 10 hours. It will no longer mount (or dismount) on any of my operating systems (Windows 7, Windows 10, MacOS). My drive cannot be mounted or 'fixed' with WD software, so it can no longer be used. Since then, it has started making the annoying clicking noise others have complained about. It has been over twenty years since I have encountered a failure with my WD drives, internal and external. There is a lot to dislike in this one, and it deserves a lower rating.

August Frey

| May 08, 2021

I plan to use it as a backup drive. Connecting it to a USB 3 hub connected to a relatively new computer and running a test program on it gave me the results I needed. The result of my run was as follows:
Sequential Read (Q = 32,T = 506. 9 MB per second, Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1): A random read of 4kiB occurred at a speed of 038 MB/s (Q= 8, T= 8): 147 MB/s [605. 2256 MB/s[243 MB/s. 133 MB/s [ 587 MB/s. The following are the IOPS:3 IOPS]/
Random Write 4Kib (Q=32,T=1): 2205 MB/s [033. It is 501 MB/s [122 kbps. Three IOPs]
Random Write of 4KiB (Q=1, T= [2133 MB/s. Three IOPS]

[R: 1024 MiB Zero percent ( 0. The second semester of 931. Five GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]* This was the time at 21:58:49 on 10/10/2019 Professional - Windows 10 18362] (x64)
We can see that it's relatively fast to read and write sequential data but significantly slower to read and write random data, which is what we would expect. It's considerably slower than an internal mechanical drive.

Daisy Williamson

| Jul 19, 2021

I've had bad luck with these drives somehow, but this one is awesome.

Originally purchased a 1TB WD Drive (previous model), and the write speed was so slow on my 2018 MacBook Pro that I returned it. It took a while for this new 4TB version to reformat after I ordered it and the first version I received would not. I replaced the item with the same one and it works as it should. I use it on my Mac and wife's PC, both of which are fast, quiet, and work flawlessly. WD is more reliable (I've had Seagate crap out on me twice in the past 10 years, so I'll never use that brand anymore) so quit wasting your time with Seagate and start using it now!.

Arya Shea

| Jun 19, 2021