This offering weighs a little more than eight ounces and is roughly the same size as an actual passport, making it one of the smallest and lightest available. It is bus-powered, meaning a single cable is used for transfers and power supply. A single blue light illuminates when the drive is active, and four rubber feet keep it secure on any surface. Western Digital sought to lessen its carbon footprint by using recycled materials for the casing.
While the casing is made of plastic, it is still surprisingly durable. The features are tailored for simplicity.
My Passport is pre-loaded with WD’s SmartWare software. It presents as two separate devices when plugged in — one drive with external storage space and one drive with factory-loaded software.
The visual interface is intuitive and built-in software allows for easy installation and management of setting. Backup and retrieval options allow you to set up incremental backups to be performed each time you connect the drive to your computer or device. Files inadvertently deleted from My Passport are easily retrieved, as are older versions of files. The drive offers password protection and 256-bit data encryption.
If cost is no concern, we recommend taking a close look at the Seagate Backup Plus Hub. It houses SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives, which allowed more physical bits of memory in the same space without decreasing the size of the bits. This drive offers a lot of capacity — it's available in 3TB, 4TB, 6TB, and 8TB versions — and it’s fast and flexible. It’s compatible with both Windows and Mac; just install the NTFS driver for Mac and you can use it interchangeably between Windows and Mac computers without reformatting. Its two integrated high-speed USB 3.0 ports on the front let you recharge your other USB devices, and with Seagate Dashboard, you can schedule automatic or on-demand backups when the drive is connected.
Despite not having a fan, it runs relatively cool and is conveniently quiet.
Back Up to an External Drive: If you have an external USB hard drive, you can just back up to that drive using your computer’s built-in backup features. On Windows 10 and 8, use File History. On Windows 7, use Windows Backup. Best External Hard Drives for Safe Data Storage Western Digital WD My Passport. This external hard drive disk is a portable model. Seagate Expansion. Seagate is a well-known company producing innovative. Western Digital Elements. The WD Element can rightly be called one of the most reliable.