Western Digital My Passport for Mac review

At a glance

Expert’s Rating

Pros

Provides up to 6TB storageCompetitive pricePassword protection

Cons

Could be fasterLarger than most portable drivesNo USB-C interface

Our Verdict

It’s not the fastest hard drive around, but the My Passport for Mac provides plenty of portable storage at a competitive price.

The high performance and compact design of solid-state drives makes them ideal for people who want a portable backup drive that they can carry with them when they’re traveling with their laptop. However, SSDs are still relatively expensive, and they also tend to have more limited capacity than old-fashioned mechanical hard drives. If you need several terabytes of storage for your Time Machine backups or work files then a traditional mechanical hard drive is still worth considering.

Hard drives have their own limitations, though, as they’re generally heavier and larger than SSDs, and portable hard drives such as Western Digital’s popular My Passport could generally only offer 5TB of storage before they simply became too large and heavy to carry around with your laptop. So Western Digital now claims to have made a breakthrough with the 2024 version of the My Passport, which it describes as “the world’s first 2.5-inch 6TB portable hard drive”. In fact, Western Digital doesn’t even bother to provide a 1TB option with the My Passport anymore, starting with a minimum of 2TB for $84.99/£75.99, with 4TB, 5TB and 6TB models also available. And even the 6TB model that we review here only costs $184.99/£165.99, so the My Passport certainly provides a very affordable backup option for laptop users.

The basic design of the drive hasn’t changed very much with this update, with a very straightforward dark-blue, rectangular plastic casing that is adorned with only a few diagonal stripes running across the top panel. As we’ve seen with previous My Passport drives, the 2TB model is quite a bit slimmer and lighter than the other models, measuring 13.5mm thick, 75mm wide and 107mm long, and weighing just 140g. The 4TB and 5TB models increase to a thickness of 19.2mm, while the 6TB model that we review here is a relatively chunky 20.6mm thick, with these three models all weighing 210g.

Somewhat oddly, the My Passport drive still uses an ageing USB Micro-B interface, although Western Digital does include a USB-A cable with a separate USB-C adaptor, so you can use the drive with newer Macs that only have USB-C as well as older Macs with USB-A. It’s a little odd that Western Digital doesn’t simply adopt the more modern USB-C interface for the drives, but that’s not really a major criticism as the limited speeds of mechanical hard drives don’t really require the higher data transfer rates that are supported by USB-C. The My Passport drives also include Western Digital’s Discovery app for Mac and Windows, which provides password protection and encryption features to help you keep important files and data safe in case the drive gets lost or stolen.

The other oddity is that – as we’ve seen in the past – Western Digital continues to offer a rather confusing variety of models within the My Passport range. The standard My Passport drive is aimed at Windows users and includes a USB-A cable, while the My Passport For Mac that we review here throws in a USB-C adaptor and is also pre-formatted for use with Macs straight out of the box. There’s also a model with the daft name My Passport Works With USB-C, which seems to be identical to the ‘For Mac’ model but uses the exFAT drive format, which is compatible with both Macs and Windows. More useful perhaps are the two ‘Ultra’ models – My Passport Ultra and My Passport Ultra for Mac (read our review) – which are slightly more expensive, but have a sturdy metal casing that might be useful for people who work outdoors and need some extra protection.

Western Digital is also a little vague about the drive’s performance. Its website states that all the My Passport drives provide a transfer rate of ‘up to 5Gb/s’ – but that actually refers to the USB interface rather than the hard drive itself. Our tests with the My Passport for Mac showed that it nudged just past 100MB/s for both read and write performance, which is obviously far slower than an SSD drive, but similar to previous. It’ll be fine for routine Time Machine backups, although creative users who need to work with large graphics or video files might still prefer a faster solid-state drive.

Should you buy Western Digital My Passport for Mac?

There are faster hard drives available – as well as SSDs, of course – and it’s long past time for WD to adopt a modern USB-C interface. Even so, the My Passport for Mac still stands out from most of its portable rivals by offering up to 6TB of storage at a very competitive price.

See how it compares to other hard drives for Mac in our round-up of the best.

Author: Cliff Joseph, Contributor

Cliff Joseph is a former editor of MacUser magazine and a freelance editor with 30(ish) years experience of Mac and PC technology. He first used a Mac working as a magazine sub-editor and found it so much better than using scissors and a pot of glue to make the words fit on the page that he become a convert to the Mac overnight. He has spent the rest of his career following the ups and downs of Apple (and is old enough to remember the time Apple came close to going bust).
Cliff writes many of MacWorld’s games reviews – and is currently exploring options for getting Diablo IV to run on a Mac…

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