My Passport for Mac ideal for video file backups and transfers.
File storage seems to always at a premium these days. While all the components keep getting smaller and smaller, it seems that hard drive space in computers is getting smaller, too. A couple of years ago, my fiancé upgraded her laptop to a MacBook Pro Retina, but she chose the smaller hard drive capacity due to the price difference. While I questioned her decision, she has made it work well for the most part. She does rely a lot on external hard drive storage to backup her files often. Within the past few days, I recently ordered a new laptop for myself, too (the 2016 MacBook Pro). And, I, too, have been faced with the hard drive space selection. I opted to upgrade my internal storage to 1TB because of the amount of video and photo editing I do on my computer. While that might be enough when I’m stationary at my office or at home, when I travel I liked to have redundant backup space and usually carry a portable hard drive. Western Digital makes a really nice line of small, portable hard drives and they recently released a new version of the My Passport for Mac.
The My Passport series drives from Western Digital are powerful and portable. They measure approximately 4” x 3” and have very minimal set-up required. You can, in fact, simply plug n’ play with them. This series of MyPassport drive comes with some additional utility software that elevates the drive’s performance and security. The WD Drive Utilities ensures that your My Passport drive is always running smoothly by providing quick tests to benchmark the drive’s performance. And the WD Security makes certain that only people you want to view the data stored on the drive have access. With WD Security, you can set a specific password for the drive and the drive icon won’t even appear on the computer’s desktop until you enter the password. In my opinion, this is a very cool feature.
Aside from being extremely portable, the My Passport for Mac has some incredible integrations with Mac computer users. This drive comes pre-formatted as HFS + Journaled for use with macOS. It’s specially formatted for use with Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra (not listed on WD’s website). The drive may need formatting if you use it with other operating systems. My Passport for Mac is ready to use with Time Machine and offers 256-bit AES hardware encryption. That combined with the password protection, your data is very secure.
My Passport for Mac uses USB 3.0 transfer speed (compatible with USB 2.0) and is capable of transferring over 20GB of data in less than 10 minutes. For my testing purposes, I actually had two My Passport drives – the My Passport for Mac and the My Passport Ultra. Both drives are using USB 3.0 and both drives have the same basic specs. The main difference between the two is that the My Passport Ultra is formatted as NTFS natively for use with PC. Mac computers will write to NTFS and so I ran a quick test to see which drive would write data faster. I had a large file of music and movies to use as my test subject. The file is 22.41 GB in size. I used a Mid-2014 MacBook Pro Retina as the computer to transfer data back and forth.
First, I tested the My Passport Ultra with the large file. It took approximately 6 minutes to transfer the 22.41 GB from the MacBook Pro to the drive. I erased the drive and plugged in the My Passport for Mac. I pulled the same file over onto it and it took 6:30 minutes to complete the same transfer. I was very happy with this transfer speed as copying the same file bundle over from my cloud drive (while I was on the same WiFi network), the transfer took approximately 40 minutes.
After I completed my file transfer test, I used Blackmagic Disk Speed Test (a Mac app that quickly measures and certifies your disk performance for working with video files specifically) to check the speed of the drive. As you can see from the screenshot below, the drive can successfully handle files up to 4K in size with no problems. My primary use for this drive will be for photo and video backup while I travel so I’m very happy with these results.
I’ve been a fan of Western Digital drives for many years. They ‘win’ in my book for consistency and stability. I’ve never had a WD drive fail on me at a critical moment and they are so easy to use. My Passport for Mac is a great addition to any Mac workstation. You can get it in four different sizes (1TB, 2TB, 3TB, or 4TB) and have a great backup drive. I love that it’s designed to work with Mac straight out of the box.
[box type=”info”] NOTE: If you are an early adopter for the new 2016 MacBook Pro, you will need a special adapter (found here) in order to connect the USB port to the USB-C port on the new MBP.[/box]
For more information, visit wdc.com
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