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.

Wd My Passport For Mac Usb 3.0 External Hdd 1tb

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.

As of 2018, Western Digital offers no shortage of external drives for Mac computers – from the My Book Essential to the My Book Pro and the My Book Studio, nearly 30 WD drives play nicely with Apple’s macOS operating system, as does the My Passport Studio model. But with more than 262.5 million PCs shipped in 2017, according to data from Statista, there’s a good chance your Passport Studio will need to play nicely with a Windows computer, too. When it comes to cross-platform flexibility, you’ve got a few options for crossing the Mac and PC streams.

About eFAT and FAT32 Here’s something your My Passport for Mac Quick Install Guide might not tell you: Hard drives usually come formatted in two different ways, one catering to Windows and one catering to Mac. NTFS-formatted drives work with Windows computers, and HFS+ drives work with Mac. However, by formatting your My Passport differently, you can ensure compatibility in a variety of different ways. Hard drives formatted to exFAT or FAT32 can read and write data on both Mac and PC operating systems, though FAT32 is limited to a 4-gigabyte-per-file size limit. Formatting your drive will erase all its data, so be sure to back it up before making the change. External Drive for Mac to Windows 10 If you’ve got a WD external drive for Mac platforms and you want it to work on a Windows 10 PC, exFAT format is your best bet. To start formatting, connect your WD Passport to your Mac; then open “Mac HD” and click “Applications,” “Utilities” and “Disk Utility.” From the Disk Utility window, select the Passport hard drive.

Here, you’ll usually see two listings of partitions available on the drive – select the listing that is furthest left. Click the Disk Utility’s “Erase” button; assign the drive a name in the “Name” field; then hit “Erase,” and click “Done” when the erasing process is complete. Now, click the “Partition” button at the top of the Disk Utility and click “Format.” Choose “exFAT” from the drop-down menu that appears and click “Apply” to format the drive, which will take a few minutes. Once the formatting is complete and you get a message that says “Operation successful,” click “Done.” To Windows 8 and Earlier The external drive for Mac to Windows 8 transition makes use of Window’s built-in Disk Management software rather than the macOS Disk Utility, but you’ll still want to format your WD Passport as an exFAT drive. To do so, connect the Passport to your PC, enter the Windows 8 Start menu and choose “Disk Management.” In the Disk Management app, right-click on the drive and select “New Simple Volume.” from the menu that appears. This brings up the New Simple Volume Wizard. Click the “Next” button until you get to the “Format Partition” window and choose “exFAT” under “File System” (you can also change the name of the drive under “Volume label” if you wish).

Make sure the “Perform a quick format” box is checked, and click “Next” when you’re ready. Click “Partition” and then “Finish” to format the drive to a cross-platform compatible exFAT mode.