

- BEST TIME MACHINE HARD DRIVE 2021 FULL
- BEST TIME MACHINE HARD DRIVE 2021 PORTABLE
- BEST TIME MACHINE HARD DRIVE 2021 PC
BEST TIME MACHINE HARD DRIVE 2021 PC
The My Passport SSD is plug and play with a PC or Mac out of the box. This way, it still works with older laptops that still feature the classic USB port. There’s also an included USB-C to USB-C cable in the box, along with a USB-C to USB-A adapter. The drive features a modern port - a USB-C - for faster transfer speeds, a welcome feature, as most laptops now opt for this port. Those files are well protected on the My Passport, as you can password-protect all your data behind 256-bit AES encryption, though that was a standard feature of all the drives we tested. Its handling of JPEGs was on par with a Mac’s performance, but RAW and larger file formats caused a bit of a slowdown. In our testing, we opened a photo off the My Passport SSD in Photoshop, made our edits and saved it back to the drive without issue. Not only can you store photos, videos and music libraries on this drive, but real-time changes are pretty seamless. So if you have 256GB internal storage, getting a 512GB drive is ideal for higher capacities of storage, and 512GB internally means a 1TB is the best option. A rule of thumb: You want to choose an external drive that’s at least twice the size of the laptop you want to back up. On the 1TB model, we were able to fit more than 250,000 photos onto the drive, more than four times the contents of our nearly-55,000-photo library on a 512GB model we could hold two backups of our library. The SSD will give off some heat, and the My Passport SSD does feel noticeably warm during long backup sessions.
BEST TIME MACHINE HARD DRIVE 2021 FULL
Backup times on Mac and PC were commendable, taking about an hour for a full backup of a 128GB drive via Time Machine. Those are speeds you’d normally get on your internal drive. To put that in real terms, we were able to move a 4.5GB HD video file in about 15 seconds and a 6.5GB 4K video in about 30 seconds. While the drive did at times peak at the manufacturer’s claimed 1050Mbps for read times and 1000Mbps for write times, speeds of 700Mbps in either direction were more typical. In our testing, we dropped it on carpet, wood flooring, fake wood flooring, tile and concrete and noted only faint scratches on the outer shell without any damage to the actual function of the drive. Though a compact beauty, it still handles drops of up to 6.5 feet, as stated by the manufacturer. You can also easily tuck it into a sleeve holding your laptop.


BEST TIME MACHINE HARD DRIVE 2021 PORTABLE
The WD My Passport SSD is an easily portable drive and fits in front or back jeans pockets or even a shirt pocket. To that end, we think you’ll be more inclined to keep a drive with a slim build in a fun color out and accessible, rather than stuffed in a drawer and forgotten. Half the battle with getting in the habit of backing up your computer is plugging in the drive and actually doing the task.
