Review: Give the gift of storage with these compact drives
Think about all the data you store digitally — it could be anything from health records to sensitive financial documents. And what about the ever-growing collection of photos you take on your phone?
Of course, you can back everything up on the cloud. Tap or click here for our comparison of Google Photos, iCloud and IDrive. I’m a big fan of having a backup of the backup, so I also use local storage, including hard drives and flash drives.
Who says gifts you buy for others (or yourself) can’t be practical? Check out the review below of a very portable SSD and a tiny flash drive.
WD My Passport SSD
Forget about the old-style, spinning hard disk drives. Today, it’s all about more storage and faster speeds using flash memory. A great example is the WD My Passport portable Solid State Drive (SSD). Check out a few highlights:
- Available in four storage capacities: 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB
- NVMe technology with read speeds of up to 1050MB/s and write speeds up to 1000MB/s (1MB/s = 1 million bytes per second)
- Password-enabled 256-bit AES hardware encryption
- Shock/vibration resistant metal case can withstand drops up to 6.5 feet
- Built-in software can automatically backup files to the SSD and/or a cloud service
- USB-C port and power cable, includes USB-A adapter
- Compatible with Windows and Mac computers
- 3.54 x 1.77 x 0.39 in., and weighs only 1.62 oz.
- 1TB option retails for $189.99 (catch it on sale during the holidays)
It’s small, it’s fast, and it can store a lot of data. But does that justify how much it costs?
How this SSD performs
I was sent the 1TB version of the My Passport SSD for review and it is surprisingly small, only slightly larger than a credit card. While the metal casing is nice, it certainly doesn’t feel indestructible, so I won’t be testing its drop resistance.
I can confirm that it is fast. Connecting it to my MacBook, I transferred a folder containing 4.5GB of data to the SSD in roughly 6 seconds. The write speed of about 1GB per second is accurate.
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