WD 256GB My Passport SSD External Portable Drive, USB 3.1, Up to 540 MB/s - WDBKVX2560PSL-WESN

By far the fastest WD drive I own. As fast as I can double-click, and Ive tried. My only regret is not purchasing a larger capacity but I needed to vet this one first. Highly recommended.

Although portable, I use this mounted to the side of my Mac Mini to add much needed storage for photos and work files. Plug it in and forget about it.

Light and durable. Cheaper than Samsung T5, but the speed is a little slower too. One thing I dont like is that the cable given is too short compared to other brands.

This review was written from the perspective of professional photographers who use the unit for Lightroom catalogs/retouching while traveling using a Surface Pro 4. The unit we purchased is the latest iteration of their portable SSD and is slightly more expensive than the other unit we were considering, the Samsung T5. The WD unit is slightly smaller and lighter, but only by a tiny amount. The main difference beside the price point is the latest version of the WD drive boasts that it is USB Type-C and USB 3.1 Gen 2 ready and does include the type-c cord which has type-c connectors on both ends. But it also includes and adaptor for the standard USB 3.0 connector, which is what the Surface Pro 4 has. The read and write times are about 4X as fast as our previous HDD and it is able to keep up with Lightroom to the point where I cannot tell a real difference between using the internal or external (WD) SSD. Read and write times run in the 400 Mb/s range with no hiccups noted. One thing I did notice is the case does heat up under heavy use, but it is just warm to the touch. Not hot at all. The unit itself feels well built but I do recommend getting the case for it as it is so small and light I do worry about it getting lost! In conclusion, if you are needing a portable external storage solution with fast read and write times, it is well worth investing in the WD My Passport SSD.

I love this little beast, but sometimes it can be very frustrating to use. I use this drive with a 2015 MacBook Pro that usually works fine unless either (1) the computer dies with the hard drive still plgged in, or (2) the drive is not safely ejected. In either case, the drive is no longer recognized when I plug it in again and I need to run a disk repair using the Disk Utility app. Sometimes the repair fails and I need to either restart my computer or unplug/replug the drive several times for the repair to work. Thankfully, this does not happen often and none of my files are lost/corrupted. However I havent seen this behavior with other hard drives. Other than that it is a great product - super fast transfer speeds and it comes in an amazing size. Overall, Id still recommend this product.

I needed an external hard drive to have enough space for all the new video games that came out recently. I bought the SSD because I didnt want anything potentially slower than the factory PS4 Pro hard drive. Turns out I should have bought the 2 tb version because I moved all my games to this SSD for the quality of life it brings to my gaming. Load times are much, much faster. Whether its the initial load, fast traveling, details loading in, etc. Buyer beware, you will never be satisfied with a standard HDD hard drive after using this SSD.

This drive runs hot and fast. Having a 2 TB capacity is also a major plus. If your system has SSD for main storage you need a fast drive like this for backups and such.

I have the larger spinning hard drive version of this also and this is much smaller and weighs next to nothing. I really like it, carry it in my laptop day pack for work and use the included encryption program. Am probably going to buy a 2nd one.

The first thing I noticed was that it was much smaller than I imagined. But it is fast and big enough for me to clear up my main boot SSD a bit. Everything is working perfectly so far, just an easy plug and play experience. My one gripe is how short the cable is that comes with it. For my desktop I would like it to be a bit longer, but for laptops it probably doesn’t matter.

I wanted to speed up my load times on my PS4. This did the trick. The times decreased about 20-30 seconds on Anthem. The only negative is the cable is short.