This is the on-the-go photographer’s dream gadget I was originally introduced to a wireless drive for photographers back in early 2017. It was a device I found while looking at the tech products at CES that year and I was highly impressed with the concept. That particular product lacked some advanced features but soon after I learned about the My Passport Wireless Pro from Western Digital.
I had the opportunity to use it while I was at CES 2018 as my portable backup drive. Sadly, the main problems I had with it was because it was using spinning, mechanical drives. That made the battery drain quicker and it also kept me from backing files up while on the move since the spinning drive needed to remain stable while transferring data. I found its transfer speed to be quite slow and the drive also lacked a CF card slot. I saw potential in the WD device and looked forward to the day when they would swap the mechanical drive for an SSD. Needless to say, while at CES 2018, Western Digital showed off the new My Passport Wireless SSD, which is a substantial update to the My Passport Wireless Pro.
I was simply in love with this device. DETAILS The My Passport Wireless SSD is an all-in-one portable drive. It has a built-in SD 3.0 card reader with a convenient one-touch copy button. The battery lasts up to 10 hours and a durable, shock-resistant SSD is housed inside the outer case. With the My Passport Wireless SSD, you can wirelessly stream 4K videos and view photos from connected devices.
The drive has the power to import media from USB card readers and it also has a built-in power bank for charging mobile devices, too. One of the most impressive specs of the My Passport Wireless SSD is that it has file preview support of RAW photo files. The drive comes in four different capacities — 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. The My Passport Wireless SSD creates a secure 802.11ac WiFi connection so you can wirelessly connect to your drive to access stored files. You can also connect it directly to your computer using USB 3.0 (cable included with the drive). You have the ability to use the My Cloud app to view media and some third party apps — like and — will talk directly to the My Passport drive as if it were an external drive for your mobile device.
Western Digital My Passport For Mac
Each drive ships with a drop-protection bumper, a USB cable, and a USB power adapter. It’s compatible with Windows 10, 8.1 or 7 and Mac OS X El Capitan, Sierra, or High Sierra. Plex-enabled or DLNA/UPnP devices are needed for streaming. USER EXPERIENCE The My Passport Wireless SSD arrived in a standard Western Digital branded box, which uses dark grey and yellow as its main colors.
The box had some product information included and the device was well identified. When you open the box’s cover, you will find a quick start guide of sorts that illustrates the main features of the My Passport and how to use them. Inside the box, you will find the drive itself, a quick start card, power adapter, and USB 3.0 cable. Set-up of the drive is pretty straightforward. It can be done using the mobile app (iOS version in my case) or your desktop computer. Aside from learning how to connect to it wirelessly, the main purposes of the initial set-up are to assign preferences for the drive.
You will be asked to approve the license agreement, select whether or not you want contents to automatically copy from an SD card or USB device when they are plugged in, and review the Enhance Your WD Experience screen, which includes automatically updating the WD SSD software. All of these settings can always be managed later from your Dashboard. There are several ways to connect/manage the content stored on your WD My Passport Wireless SSD device — wirelessly through the mobile app, Mac utility app or as a Shared drive, through the web interface, or through a wired connection directly through a USB 3.0 connection. I tested all of these options along with transferring data through SD card and USB 20 to make sure I ran a thorough testing process for this review. I will break down the experience I had with each feature. USB 3.0 This was probably the most natural connection I could have used. WD provides a USB 3.0 Micro-B 10-pin to Type A cable with the drive.
Western Digital My Passport For Mac Support
The Micro-B end plugs into the drive while the Type A side plugs into your computer. I have a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar so I only have USB-C ports on my machine. Because of this, I used a dock with a USB 3.0 connection. When I plugged in the drive for a wired data transfer, I used one of those ports.
When you plug the drive in using a cable, it mounts like any other external drive would. You can see a disk image on your desktop and access the files using a standard Finder window interface.
If you are using a Mac, you will need to use Paragon NTFS for Mac in order to read and write to the drive. WD includes this software on the drive for users to install without any hassle. When I installed it, I was still having some issues with being able to write to the drive. I discovered that after you install the software, you must restart your computer in order for the utility to work properly. After my restart, I could access files quickly and easily.
WiFi (Desktop) When you connect to the My Passport drive wirelessly on a Mac, you can view the contents of it one of two ways. First, the drive will show up as a shared device and you can open the files in a Finder window as usual. The other way is to use the WD Utility App, called WD Access.
If you already have a WD app like WD Sync installed, both the WD apps will appear in the WD App Manager in the menu bar. From this menu, you can open the direct file window for managing the contents of the drive. Another option when you connect to a desktop computer via WiFi is to access the drive’s dashboard through the WD web interface. In this area, you can configure the FTP access, security, battery usage optimization, and Plex server, as well as several other settings Mobile App The mobile app for iOS is very easy to use.
The sign-on process is very similar to how you get online on the Desktop. First, you find the secure WiFi network broadcast from the drive. “My Passport” is in the name of the network. Then, you enter the passkey provided by WD and printed on the identification sticker on the top of the drive.
Once you are connected, you can view your files by selecting your storage device and reviewing the material stored there. You can open files to preview them including RAW image files. SPEED TESTING Given that there are a lot of different ways to access and store files on this drive, I completed a lot of different speed tests based on the different input options on the device.
I used a single MP4 file that is 2.36GB in size. I have included the results below. BUILT-IN SD CARD READER. Standard SD card (SanDisk 8GB Class 6 30MB/s): File transferred in 52.11 seconds. Micro SD card: Did not work with SD card adapter.
Tried two different SD card adapters and had transfer failures both times. This could have been caused by the age of the adapters. USB 2.0 HOST PORT CONNECTED TO CARD READER. Card Reader (Satechi Aluminum Type-C USB 3.0 and Micro/SD Card Reader)/Micro SD card (Transcend 16GB Class 10): 1 minute, 30 seconds USB 3.0 CONNECTED TO COMPUTER: 6.6 seconds For me, the biggest problem I’ve had with the My Passport Wireless SSD was waiting for it to hit store shelves. When I saw it at CES, I wanted to use it immediately. Since I’ve received the drive, I have been using it every chance I get and it’s now a staple in my camera bag. If I take my out for a shoot, then the Western Digital My Passport Wireless SSD is coming with me.
CONCLUSION Even though we live in the digital world and no longer have to wait for film to be developed to know if we got the shot, I still have some uncertainty since I shoot in the RAW format. So for me, one of the biggest benefits of this portable drive is being able to preview the RAW files and know for sure that the images I took were right on the money. Honestly, I have shot two major local events and a family vacation and without the drive, I would have gone home without knowing for sure that the images were captured correctly.
Thanks to the preview ability of the WD My Passport Wireless SSD I was able to view my images on my iPad after allowing the drive to copy all my images off the SD cards. I could see that a few of my images were out of focus and because of the My Passport Wireless SSD, I knew in time to reshoot and avoided some mishaps. With the use of an SSD, the weight of the My Passport Wireless has decreased and it feels wonderful in my hands. I don’t feel bogged down by it in my. I felt like there was a huge difference between transferring files using the mechanical drive and the SSD — like night and day.
Compared to the My Passport Wireless Pro, the My Passport Wireless SSD is outstanding. I do still wish there was a CF card slot, but the super fast SSD makes up for the lack of that feature. This is a must-have device for all photographers and videographers. I absolutely LOVE mine and can’t ever see myself out taking photos without it. Western Digital makes a lot of fine products and since I’ve had decent success with them in the past, I felt safe that my data would be well cared for while being stored on the My Passport Wireless SSD. For more details, visit Find Western Digital on.
Western Digital’s is a solid, compact, comparatively speedy little USB-only portable hard drive that also happens to be Time Machine–ready and designed for the Mac. With a 500GB capacity, a three-year warranty, and a shock-resistant shell that can withstand your average wear and tear, the My Passport is one of the best portable drives we’ve seen for the Mac. The My Passport is a simple, light drive.
I put it through our series of handling tests, which include tossing the drive around my cubicle and dropping it to the ground several times to see how it handles the punishment. But for all the abuse, the drive didn’t slow down a bit and showed little wear. The drive gets a bit hot as the fanless aluminum case works to draw heat away from the drive mechanism, but the upside is that the drive ran quietly throughout our tests. Western Digital My Passport Like many USB-only drives, on older laptops the My Passport may not be able to draw sufficient power to operate from the bus alone, and so an auxiliary cable may be necessary—it’ll cost an extra $10 from Western Digital. In our performance tests, the My Passport had surprisingly fast times for an USB-only drive. The 1GB copy test took 50 seconds, which is about 2 seconds faster than most competing drives.
The duplication test finished in 1 minute and 14 seconds, putting it on par with our top USB performer, Buffalo’s ( ). The low-memory Photoshop test took only 1 minute and 35 seconds, again placing the My Passport among the fastest USB-only drives we’ve tested. While the My Passport can’t compete with the higher 1TB or 2TB capacities of desktop drives, the 500GB capacity is on the bigger side for a portable drive.
Unless you require high-end capacities for professional video and audio recordings, the My Passport should have plenty of space to meet your consumer needs. At $150, the 500GB My Passport has an impressive price per gigabyte of $0.30. Timed trials Copy 1GB file 0:50 Duplicate 1GB file 1:14 Low-memory Photoshop 1:35 Scale = minutes:seconds How we tested. We ran all tests with drives connected to a Mac Pro Quad 2.66GHz Xeon with Mac OS X 10.5 installed and 1GB of RAM. We tested the drive with each available port.
We copied a folder containing 1GB of data from our Mac 's hard drive to the external hard drive to test the drive 's write speed. We then duplicated that file on the external drive to test both read and write speeds. We also used the drive as a scratch disk when running our low-memory Adobe Photoshop CS3 Suite test. This test is a set of four tasks performed on a 150MB file, with Photoshop 's memory set to 25 percent—Macworld Lab Testing by Chris Holt. Specifications Price per gigabyte $0.30 Connectors USB 2.0 (1) Rotational speed 5,400 rpm Other capacities 320GB Macworld’s buying advice The market is pretty saturated with USB-only drives from a variety of manufacturers. Price per gigabyte and speed have become paramount concerns, and the only technical way to compare the contenders. The My Passport for Mac stacks up well against competing drives, producing some of the best times we’ve seen in a USB-only drive.
It has comparatively strong pricing (though it’s by no means the cheapest on the market), and it has a solid warranty behind it. Some may trust other drive mechanisms over Western Digital’s, while others may simply prefer a more stylish drive choice; but for my money, this is the premier USB-only portable drive on the market right now. Chris Holt is an assistant editor for Macworld.