Photos and Features

Okay, so there aren’t a ton of things to talk about when it comes to portable hard drives so this might be a little short but let's take a look at the WD My Passport. Now the most obvious thing is the bright orange color and I know not everyone gets as excited about orange, remember there are 7 other colors including multiple muted colors like black and black with grey. For me though, the bright color is important, because this is the type of device that I sort of loose in the madness that is my office sometimes. I’m not saying my office is a mess, but sometimes things blend in and being able to spot the My Passport is helpful to grab it to transfer files or in my case to back up things for a trip or LAN.

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So looking past the color, the drive has a very similar design to the My Passport SSD that I took a look at last year. No surprise there, this was out before that drive. What that means though is the wave or grooved design in the bottom half, a split down the middle and then the smooth part up top. Then the WD logo is embossed into the front as well.

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Around back you have the same design only this side isn’t as clean. For one all around the edge, you can see that this is where the casing comes apart. Then, of course, they have to put all of the required certifications logos. WD did try to keep things a little cleaner though because all of those logos are in another shade of orange. Then below all of that is a sticker with the model information, the place of manufacture, and the serial number. Lastly, they also slipped tiny orange feet on to the corners, so if you lay the drive down flat it shouldn’t slide around.

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Down along the bottom edge the grooves do continue slightly. This is also where the USB cable plugs in. While this is a spinning drive WD did still go with USB 3.0 for the interface as you can see from the micro-USB3 connection here. A not so well known secret is devices with this plug can sometimes still plug in with a normal micro-USB connection on the part to the right in this photo. It will plug in, but I don’t know if it will work in this case. Anyhow also in this area, just to the right, is a small slit with a white LED indicator that lights up when you are plugged in and transferring data.

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So the included cord isn’t super long, you are going to need to keep the drive near your PC or laptop while it is plugged in. The cord is also bright orange to match the drive itself.

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As for the overall size of the My Passport, it is a lot larger than the SSD version. But compared to some of my older spinning drive externals it isn’t too bad. It is just past 4 and a ¼ or 110mm tall. Then 3.21in wide or 81.5mm. As for the thickness, it is 13.8mm or 0.54 in thick but apparently according to the specifications the larger capacity models (3 and 4 TB) are thicker at 21.5mm or 0.85 in so keep that in mind. This version weighs 170g where the larger drives are 250g as well.

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