Does the new WD My Passport lineup do anything new or different, and does it matter which generation you buy? We're going to find out.WD has stuck with the legacy Micro-USB 3.0 port on this modelWD My Passport (2019) 5TB design and featuresWD attempted to turn portable hard drives into conversation pieces with its 2016 redesign, executed by a high-profile external branding agency. User rating, 4.6 out of 5 stars with 340. Model: WDBKYJ0020BSL-WESN.It matches the recently launched My Passport Go series.Even the number of colour options has been halved – the distinctive yellow, orange and white are gone. The drive still has a striped pattern across half its front, but it's far less pronounced now. WD has seemingly trimmed as much weight and bulk as possible, the corners and sides are rounded for easy pocketability, and it pretty much fades into the background. When we got our hands on one of those drives, we liked its personality but not the practicality – the corners were sharp, and weight had increased.The new design feels like a complete 180-degree about-face. Everything including the packaging was given this funky hipster treatment.The 1TB and 2TB versions are 11.15mm thick and weigh 120g, while the 4TB and 5TB versions are listed as 19.15mm thick and 210g in weight. The red and blue options have two-tone finishes with black bases.You have a choice of capacities. The plastic is also a dull matte, which is more utilitarian.On the drive itself, you'll find an installer for the WD Discovery desktop tool which offers cloud and social media syncing tools but shows lots of promotional content. The WD Backup tool lets you synchronise folders on your PC, WD Drive Utilities includes diagnostics and a secure erase tool, and WD Security lets you set up encryption. It does however promise 256-bit AES encryption, a three-year warranty, and WD's usual downloadable software. We're reviewing a 5TB unit in this series, which is the highest capacity portable hard drive we've seen from WD so far.The official spec sheet makes no mention of data transfer speed.
![]() My Passport 2Tb Rpm Portable Hard Drives![]() The Anvil storage benchmark reported read and write scores of 152.31 and 211.45 respectively for a total of 363.76. Peak random read and write speeds were much lower of course. The total formatted capacity was 4657.47GB.CrystalDiskMark showed sequential read and write speeds of 133.3MBps and 125.6MBps which is very good for a hard drive. We used our standard test bench, built out of an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X CPU, a Gigabyte Aorus X470 Gaming 7 Wifi motherboard, 2x8GB of G.skill DDR4 RAM, a 1TB Samsung SSD 860 Evo boot drive, a Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 590 graphics card, and a Corsair RM650 power supply.This drive arrives formatted to the NTFS file system by default, and we would have preferred the more modern ExFAT for cross-platform compatibility. That said, we still did test the new WD My Passport (2019) to see what it delivers. Mac files cleanerIf you do have an eye for design though, the previous generation models are still available in retail. It might not be very attention-grabbing, but that isn't likely to be a high priority for many people. Even with cloud services, or if you have enough space on your PC, it's always a good idea to have physical backups, particularly of your irreplaceable photos and documents.The WD My Passport (2019) offers massive capacity plus portability at a very reasonable price. For most people, that's more than a lifetime's worth of data, but there are some digital hoarders, content creators, and pro users who could use the space. A hard drive is still the better option for bulk transfers and backups.It isn't anywhere near as fast as a portable SSD, but offers much more space at a lower costTo put into context just how much space 5TB is, you could store one million MP3 songs or photographs that occupy 5MB each, or roughly 2,500 hours' worth of HD video.
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