WD’s new My Passport SSD is a gorgeous-looking external SSD storage device that offers storage capacities ranging between 256GB to 2TB. The variant we have reviewed here is the 1TB version that comes in very distinct greyish-silver and black colour tones. While the drive is USB Type-C and USB 3.1 Gen 2 read, it is also compatible with USB 3.0, USB 2.0, and USB-A ports.

Inside the box, you get the WD My Passport SSD drive, a USB Type-C to Type-C cable, a Type-C to Type-A adapter, a quick start guide, and the warranty info. Outside the box, the drive comes preformatted with exFAT, for compatibility with Windows and Mac. On paper, the drive offers fast read speeds of up to 540 MB/s, thanks to the USB 3.1 Gen 2 bus, which is also known as USB 3.1.

The drive measures ‎8.89-by-4.57-by-0.99 cm in dimension and weighs around 40.82-gms. The drive also offers hardware encryption. So, you can set a password to help keep it protected with built-in 256-bit AES hardware encryption with WD Security software. In addition, it can also withstand drops from a height of up to 6.5-feet.

On paper, the drive offers data transfer speeds of up to 540 MB/s. In order to test its performance, we ran two benchmarks on it – CrystalDiskMark 8 and ATTO Disk Benchmark 4.0.1. On CrystalDiskMark, we were able to clock a sequential read speed of 462 MB/s and a write speed of 461 MB/s. On ATTO Disk Benchmark, we clocked a read speed of 432 MB/s and a write speed of 440 MB/s.

Since it is an SSD drive, there are no moving parts and hence it is less susceptible to over-heating and data corruption issues.
For a price of AED 700, the WD My Passport SSD (1TB) is a very lightweight external storage device that does its job as advertised.

Price: AED 700