My Passport

Years ago, I bought an Iomega StorCenter Home Media Server. Iomega was bought out by Lenovo whom only offered limited support for Iomega products. I updated it a few years ago and since its never been able to connect over the Wifi, only by ethernet cable. Then recently the Server started making hard drive failure sounds. It had all of my downloaded TV series and films on. So I decided it was time to update. Instead of opting for another media server, I went for a WD My Passport (Yellow) 4TB (photoed above and below). Here’s the My Passport features: * It’s Plug and Play, meaning that it doesn’t require its own power source but is instead powered through USB. * It’s portable. * It is made by Western Digital (WD) whom have an excellent reputation for making high quality hardware products. * It comes in various hard drive sizes: 1TB, 2TB, 3TB & 4TB. * It has a funky design. * It comes in various colours: black, white, blue, red, yellow & orange. * It runs silently. * It is relatively cheap, available on Amazon for just under a £100 for a 4TB model. * It has Built-in 256-bit AES Hardware Encryption meaning that you can set it so that a password is required for access. * This feature cleverly allows someone to use the drive on any computer – even one that doesn’t have the WD software installed and without having to install any software. * Auto Backup software is installed. Or you can use other software for backups including Apple’s Time Machine. I decided because my new drive is portable that I wanted a solid case to protect it when not in use. I found this AmazonBasics Case: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B003LSTD38/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&psc=1&linkCode=ll1&tag=antonysicom-21&linkId=94b70fe2f3063bce1cbd058c27370073&language=en_GB If you’re looking for an external and portable hard drive to give yourself more disk space on your laptop or PC, I can highly recommend the WD My Passport (Yellow) 4TB on Amazon. Review soon, Antony

Review of the WD 4TB My Passport (2016) model. The photographs show the previous generation (left most in all pictures) beside this new generation of drive (rightmost drive). I'm a long time user of WD passport external usb hard drives. This is the first 4TB I've bought, used for a backup of a NAS. Capacity + Speeds: This is a USB3 hard drive, giving very fast speeds. Attached are screenshots from a benchmark utility, showing 116MB/s read 107MB/s write. For comparison, the previous generation (2TB) got 112MB/s read and 100MB/s write, so a slight improvement. The formatted capacity is 3.63 TB. The enclosure/case: The case is solid. It is a bit more fancy than previous WD My Passports, and a little bigger. Yet, it remains a solid construction and has a feeling of durability. The LED light on the back is now a horizontal slot which has a softer light compared to the previous generation drives. Comparing to the previous generation, the case is ever so slightly larger, but there really isn't much in it. See the photos. I prefer the new case as it allows multiple drives to be set on top of each other, whereas the previous generation was slightly rounded so they tended to slide off each other. Included in the box / software: The drive comes with a USB3 cable. You also get the WD Drive Utilities, Encryption software and Backup software. However, after checking the drive with the WD Utilities to ensure it survived transport safely, I wiped the drive for my own use. You can always grab a copy of the software from WD's homepage in the future. Overall, this seems like a great drive. Only time will tell how reliable it is, but it does come with a 2 year warranty as standard. This can be extended by a year if you purchase WD Care.

Having 3 crashed Seagate drives in the past (and 3 heart attacks accompanying these incidents) I always buy and recommend WD drives regarding data storage. I already own 2 of these colour box drives and I needed to get a 4TB one. Like the rest, this little drive delivers the goods straight out of the box with no flaws. The reasons for choosing these drives are primarily because they are technically superior and ultra durable. The slim case design makes it ideal for saving space and travelling (as opposed to book type drives) and there is no need to carry an extra AC adapter that need to be plugged to the mains. Also the colour choice of the casing (with matching coloured USB cord) makes it easily identifiable: blue for work files backups, yellow for personal files and photos backups and red for porn LOL! It won't overheat to an alarming level even during long entire drive backups, again as opposed to the larger case drives, especially the older generations which you could use as a radiator as well. Just plug in to a USB 3.0 port and works like a charm everytime. Top notch drive, get it, remember to back up and keep your files safe.

I've owned many external hard drives over the years and have always gone for Western Digital branded drives both for internal and external use as I have never yet seen one fail. The My Passport 1TB drive is no exception and is as simple as they come. I don't use any of the included software or features, instead reformatting the drive usually to HFS+ (Mac OS Extended). Contrary to what the manufacturer would like you to believe there is no need to purchase the Mac specific drives, as the cheaper PC variants can be easily reformatted using disk utility and can then be used for time machine backup or simple plug and play storage. In use the drive is quiet, cool and fast. My only gripe, and the reason for the loss of a star, concerns the USB 3.0 connector. The socket feels incredibly flimsy and flexes when a cable is inserted. Though this is a universal plug and not great by design, other products do feature better quality connectors than this which offer a more pleasing fit and a better impression of longevity. If I were using one of these drives on the go, I would take care to avoid putting any pressure on the connector, or plugging / unplugging it excessively to avoid damage as once broken it would be very difficult to repair. Despite this I still wouldn't hesitate to recommend this and other Western Digital drives. For performance, reliability and value for money they simply can't be beaten. No other manufacturer has achieved such a high reliability rate in my own personal experience, with competing drives from Seagate failing in well under a year and effectively becoming expensive paperweights, as they contained sensitive data and couldn't be returned. The My Passport drives have a proven track record that in my opinion is well deserved. As an update to this review, I recently purchased the 4TB drives to replace some Seagate Expansions drives which were beginning to fail. The larger drives are physically similar albeit slightly taller, but perform as well. I also took the opportunity to try the included software. Includes is a simple yet well thought out backup solution for Windows that should be fine for most needs. You also get WD's drive utilities, which is a small program for both Mac and Windows that allows you to run various diagnostics and health checks on the drives as well as configure the sleep timer and disable the drive's LED. The WD discovery app brings everything together in one place, and also provides a very convenient way to register the drives with WD to be eligible for the 3 year warranty.

OK, some background. I have a PlayStation Pro and was going to upgrade the 1Tb HDD to 2Tb seeing as there was no support for external storage drives. Then along came the 4.50 system software update with support for external drives up to 8Tb. The only 'catch' as such being that they need to be USB 3.0 and, according to some who were on the Beta at any rate, not have additional USB ports for some reason. Not one to take a chance with such things, and seeing as the cost difference between 8Tb and 4Tb external HDDs isn't exactly minimal, I opted for a 4Tb. My thinking being that, to be honest, when you add to internal 1Tb (which will still be used for game saves and assorted data that doesn't get stored to the external HDD) a total of 5Tb with 4Tb reserved for game installs will be plenty. Then it was a matter of which drive, and personal experience leads me towards WD (with a three year warranty) rather than Seagate. So how did the install go? Literally took less than a minute including finding the USB at the rear of the PlayStation Pro to plug it in and for the console to identify the drive and reformat it. Works like a charm. Silent in operation, tucked away out of sight behind the console and doesn't even get particularly warm either. Would I recommend this drive to anyone wanting to upgrade the storage capacity of a PlayStation 4 or Pro? Hell yes...

I have an original 500GB PS4 which I was intending to upgrade to a PS4 pro until I heard rumours about a PS5 milling around. The last rumour I heard was it was a 2020 speculated release. With it being the latter half of 2018 at time of writing I didn't see the point in buying another PS4. It's a lot of money for an arguably short amount of time (potentially). I was however annoyed with having only 5 of the 20 odd games I bought on the HDD at any one time. It was frustrating if a friend wanted to play a game I didn't have on the console at the time. Plus in one of the Sony Sales I bought a couple of digital games. Though lazy I have found digital games so much more accessible as I just drop one for the other in seconds without moving (a 1st world entitlement issue for sure) So I decided that going forward I would buy Digital only games, they are more expensive new, but cheap in sales, so much easier to play with a 2 second attention span like mine. So with the setup story out of the way, I researched all around the place and found 4 reviews I trusted online of which they all advised NOT to get a solid state drive or SSD as they are more expensive for less space and the PS4 has an internal Bus speed limitation, which essentially leads to a fast drive being slowed to USB speeds any way. So of the large space HDD this was either in top place or second across the 4 reviews. Placing top 2 4 times seemed like a good sign. Bought it, plugged it in, formatted it to PS4 file system (must do this in order to use it as extended storage) and transferred all my games to the drive. It all worked out fine, the transfer was slow but when you are transferring 500GB and then installing another 1000GB from other games it will take a while. Had 0 issues so far, games load in good time, I don't have any issues in game with speeds, frame rates or anything. I wouldn't notice the difference between the external and the internal drive. The key thing is I have the space to have my entire collection of games on there, including all my PS+ free games, plus demos and such and I still have a tonne of room. If the PS5 (is any good) supports HDD expansion in the same way the PS4 does then I can either wipe all the PS4 games off (if they are not compatible with the PS5) or keep them and swap it between consoles (assuming they use the same file system) Either way I am sure my HDD will be useful for years to come either on my PS4 or any future console I purchase (as this will work with Microsoft's products) or if worse comes to worse I can re-format in a FAT file system and use it as storage for my computer files. I'm a fan of WD products and this drive is brilliant so far, it's doing the job I bought it for incredibly well and I am enjoying bouncing from game to game as I get bored of one, moving on to the other.

This was schedule to come out to me on Thursday, it was then improved to Tuesday but actually arrived on Monday! Which was a delightful surprise. As for the product itself, it has 931GB of available storage which is ample for any common use. The reading and writing speeds are decent and read at the mid-to-high 20's (so around 26-29 on average) of course using Mb/s as the units. For those who don't know, read speed is how fast the hard drive can be read and communicated to the computer whereas write speed is how fast files can be put on/downloaded/transferred to the drive. The hard drive is extremely simple and easy to use too. You can start moving files around as soon as you plug it into your computer but there is software in the Hard Drive that you can install for further personalisation/optimisation if you'd like. All in all, great product, great storage size, great read and write speeds (for everyday use)

Still have this thing, it's working fine. Good if you are a student at university studying film, photography or anything to do with having to save huge files. It helps to takeaway the pressure from your computer.