Compare Wd My Passport For Mac
Jul 8, 2015 - I have a two-year-old 1TB Western Digital My Book I use for monthly Time Machine backups on my Mac. I paid roughly $150 for it (they're ~$99.
The WD Elements and the WD My Passport external hard drives are targeted at the portable drive, on the go market place. The WD Elements is positioned as their entry-level drive for the portable consumer and Western Digital is quite open in saying it is a basic drive. The WD My Passport drive is aimed at the market above the Elements drive and classed as the start of their premium external hard drive range. And the WD My Passport comes in a 'for Mac' guise, but more on that later. Then the questions you may have in mind are; If there isn't a special offer on at the moment is it worth paying the extra to move up to the My Passport drive? And when there is a price premium. Is the My Passport drive worth it?
Let's dig in deep and find out. Nope they come in identical drive sizes, we'll have to look elsewhere other than drive capacity to separate the two.
The important thing to remember when you are planning to buy an external hard drive is to work out how much capacity you need for your Mac and not to scrimp. For example If you are planning on using the drive as a backup for Time Machine then calculate how much disk you are backing up and times by two and that way you will have the capacity you'll need as a minimum for use with Time Machine. In some cases it pays to have a product that has been on the market a while. In the case of the this drive was released to the market in 2013.
It is a strong seller and has been consistently amongst Amazon's best sellers in the portable external drive market. It's well priced, reliable and flexible in that you can attach it to a Mac, PC or connect the drive to a games console.
Yes, it's basic and that means there are no frills that come with the drive. And the painful truth is that sometimes those frills can look attractive but they can get you into trouble. More on that later.
The My Passport drive is the newer product, released to the market in 2016, positioned by WD to be the next step up compared to the basic Elements drive. The product has also sold well, has proven to be reliable and has the same flexibility in that you can also plug the external drive into a Mac, PC or a games console. What is it about the WD My Passport drive that justifies the higher price? Well let us see. The USB standard is backwards compatible, thanks be.
This means that if you have a newer Mac, say a Macbook Air or Macbook Pro with Thunderbolt connections you will need to purchase for yourself a USB C to USB A adaptor, or a USB cable that is USB C at one end and USB B Micro at the other end. Neither the nor the My Passport drives are Thunderbolt drives and won't read and write at Thunderbolt speeds. But Hey, you do pay a price premium for Thunderbolt drives and if you are not a power user - and you would know if you are one.
A Thunderbolt drives speed isn't needed for backup or for storage of normal everyday files, pictures or music. Armed with your adaptor USB cable you plug into your new Mac and due to backwards compatibility your Mac will send the information down to the Elements or the My Passport at USB 3.0 speed. It may sound obvious to state but neither of these drives are classed as rugged in any way. Yes, they are sold as portable but there is little to protect the drive from shakes, drops excessive heat or cold. If you are truly porting these drives around then a protective case is a must to protect the drive and your data. These are laptop class drives, which is why they are a convenient size and weight to carry around. But they are not the most robust of drives.
This means that when in use place them on a solid surface before powering up. The My Passport user manual clearly states this.
Knocks or shakes in use are particularly damaging and there is no ramp loading technology as on the to offer some protection. Hitting all the primary colors and what's more the USB cable provided matches the drive. So apart from matching to your other accessories or clothing there is a practical aspect, when you have multiple drives.
You can buy a drive color and team it with the function you want it to serve. Spare backup drive - blue. Drive for your music - yellow A drive color for particular types of projects you're storing on it. The LED indicator light on the My Passport drive provides indications for;. When the drive is being accessed - fast flashing. On standby - Slow flashing.
Idle - steady constant light. Off - the LED is off Other considerations, the My passport has squared corners, I guess helpful for stacking purposes but some users have disliked the angular sharp corners Personally I think it depends on your personal preference here, The drive comes with a smooth end which some have said shows fingerprints and can look grubby quickly. The other end being patterned. I think you would have to go some to put scratches on the plastic outer, that said I really wouldn't recommend just putting the drive in a bag loose as the WD advert for the drive seems to suggest. It is not a ruggedized drive, knocks, shakes being tossed about in a bag with no protection will shorten the life of these portable drives.
The WD Elements at the other end of the look spectrum is practical, black, rounded corners - there is little to offend. My favorite site for this data is the usb.userbenchmark.com. Where for this comparison they have over 3,800 User Benchmarks recorded. The speed test and results are taken as an average of all these tests. The My passport was 4% faster on USB 3.0 performance When the My Passport 1TB is compared to the WD Elements 1TB. The pure read performance was 101 Mb/s. 3% faster, versus 98 Mb/s on the WD Elements Portable.
Write performance was 103 Mb/s 4% faster, versus 99.2 Mb/s On the random write speed. Casio cdp 120 drivers for mac os. This test probably more accurately reflects real world use as a typical consumer user would write files of various sizes.
The My Passport got the crown At around 9% faster overall than the WD Elements Portable Here is a. Both are USB powered so this mean's that all you need to do is power up your Mac, Macbook Pro or Macbook Air and plug in the USB cable.
Note that by default the drives come with USB 3.0 cables and an adaptor cable or USB C to Micro USB B cable will be needed for the Mac's with Thunderbolt connections. After a few seconds your Mac will recognize the drive is connected.
The drive will appear as an Icon on your desktop. So that's it in terms of physical connection what about using the external drive. By default the WD Elements Portable is NTFS formatted as is the My Passport drive. Your Mac running Mac OS reads and writes to disks formatted as;. Mac OS Extended (Journaled) file system, also known as HFS+ or.
ExFAT file systems or. the new Apple File System (AFS) newly available with Mac OS High Sierra.
But don't let that put you off, because Mac ready formatted drives come at a price premium and you may need to reformat them anyway as Mac OS can be pretty picky about how its formatting is done. And the act of reformatting both drives is quick and easy. I have instructions here on the site depending on what you plan to use the external drive for. Would like to find out how to format the WD Elements for Mac?. Would like to find out how to format the WD My Passport for Mac?.
The 'for Mac' guise of the WD My Passport comes ready formatted as HFS+ (known on the Mac as Mac OS Extended (journaled) file system). A nice to have for those Mac users who really do not want to go to the trouble of formatting a drive no matter how easy it is. You plug this drive in and it's there ready to drag and drop your files to or connect up to Time Machine. This drive is a USB 3.0 drive the same as the other My Passport drives however it is supplied with a USB-C cable ready for connection to the newest Macs. Saving you purchasing an adaptor cable. You won't get the snazzy colors I'm afraid.
Format Wd My Passport For Mac
This drive is only available in black. You can download a version of the WD Discovery software that runs on Mac directly from the Western Digital support site. The Mac version doesn't include the backup software.
Mac has its own backup software - Time Machine. So not only will the WD backup software not work on your Mac you don't need it and Western Digital knows this and does not supply this software for Mac. Mac OS also has Disk Utility which allows you to run a check on the external drive health, repair transient errors and of course reformat the drive. Largely your Mac has you covered for the utilities the WD Discovery software provides. The My Passport is supplied with inbuilt 256-bit AES hardware encryption on the drive itself and that teams with the WD Security software. As I said earlier the software supplied is PC only however, You can download the Mac version of the WD Security software direct from the Western Digital support site. The Mac version of this software is supplied on this drive by default on the 'for Mac' version of the My Passport drive - if you pay the extra for that flavor.
You then use the WD Security interface to manage the password and electronic hardware encryption. Great you say There are some buts. The WD Security software needs to be on all the Mac's you are connecting the My Passport drive to so you can manage the password protection. Bit of a pain if you are swapping the drive between Macs. Say your Mac had a major failure and you can't boot up normally. You could always boot up to Mac OS Recovery and use your Time Machine backup to completely restore your system. Even to a replacement Mac.
But if your stuck with a drive that needs the security system unlocked, before you can get to your Time Machine backup, but you can't unlock it because you can't get to the WD security software. You may as well not have a backup.
Wd Passport For Mac Troubleshooting
A 'handy' feature is, forget your password and type it in five times wrong and your My Passport drive erases everything on it. To be fair, forget your drive encryption password under Mac OS and you are in trouble too but at least you can play around to remember it. Your Macbook Pro or Macbook Air hasn't been used for a little while and goes onto standby. The password for the drive needs to be re-entered if not set up on that Mac to automatically open the drive on your Macbook waking up. You do pay extra for these software features, and you may like them for your particular case. All I am trying to do is to outline where it may trip you up.
If you use Mac OS to manage your security then your Mac and the Mac's recovery software understands all about it. Both the WD Elements and the My Passport external hard drives are manufactured by Western Digital - it's where they get the WD part of their names. Started their company in 1970 so have been around for nearly 40 years. I would say any company that has been around that long must be doing something right.
Their products have a great reputation in the market place for reliability, going head to head with some of the best names out there in the consumer market place. They have sold thousands and thousands of external drives covering a raft of industry areas from, networked attached storage, solid state drives through to drives targeted at specific markets.