Until WD’s My Passport SSD showed up on our doorstep, Samsung’s T3USB 3.1 (Gen 1, 5Gbps) portable SSD was the last word in super-svelte, high-capacity storage. Now there’s at least a conversation. The My Passport SSD even adds a little spice to the debate by using a Type C USB 3.1 (10Gbps) interface. The extra bandwidth made no difference in performance, and the T3 is still a little faster. More on the why of that later.
Price and Design
Small and fast costs more. At the time of this writing, the WD My Passport SSD was available only from Best Buy, with the 256GB version costing $100, the 512GB version priced at $200, and the 1TB version we tested going for an even $400. Darn, no break on capacity. That’s not cheap, but roughly on par with the T3.
The My Passport SSD is roughly 3.5 inches long, 1.75 inches wide, and a mere 0.4 inch thin. We can’t think of anything offhand that’s of a similar size, though an oversized lighter comes to mind. The important bit is that it fits handily in the palm of your hand, and readily into all but the smallest of pockets.
The drive weighs only a few ounces, and the two-tone, half-beveled design looks quite nice. A bit gaudier than the Samsung T3, but perhaps more interesting. The drive uses a USB Type C port, but comes with a C-to-A adapter for use with older systems.
WD
Note that while WD, unlike Samsung, bundles some pretty fair backup software, we don’t recommend external SSDs for backup. That’s because all of the high-capacity USB SSDs we’ve used will occasionally, and seemingly arbitrarily, decide they no longer contain data. Recreate the partition and re-format, and they’re good to go, but the data is gone. We’ve experienced this type of failure with both the Samsung T1 and T3, as well as the Sandisk Extreme 900, with no discernible reason as to why.
Performance
The 1TB My Passport SSD is a bit faster than the Samsung T3 according to CrystalDiskMark, as shown below. However, both our 20GB copy tests and the AS SSD benchmark mildly disagree.
[Source”pcworld”]