The SanDisk Extreme Pro is more expensive - at $190, $40 more - than its brethren but is far more rugged with an IP55 rating to back it, making it an interesting alternative (assuming the price difference remains constant). WD’s sister brand, Sandisk, has what looks like repackaged versions of the My Passport portable SSD complete with encryption software and five-year warranty but for a more active audience.

Note that prices can and will vary wildly depending on a number of factors suggested retail prices are just that, suggested. Rivals to the My Passport external SSD will be fast (1GBps speeds or more), relatively affordable and quite compact. Also as expected, the drive can be secured using password protection and 256-bit AES hardware encryption using WD Security. The latter is probably the most interesting of the three as in theory, it allows you to save your data to the drive and a copy to an independent cloud storage service for disaster recovery. It acts as a dashboard and allows you to control and install apps like WD Drive utilities and WD Backup. Perplexing to say the least even if we account for the OS and the file system overheads.Īlso part of the lot is WD Discovery, the default storage software suite that comes with the drive and is available for Windows and Mac. Other benchmarks delivered the same range of results but transferring a single 10GB file proved to be slower than expected, far slower at about 280MBps. Here’s how the WD My Passport (2020 edition) portable SSD performed in our suite of benchmark tests:ĬrystalDiskMark: 1046MBps (read) 1013MBps (write)Ītto: 999MBps (read, 256mb) 959MBps (write, 256mb)ĪS SSD: 455MBps (seq read) 465MBps (seq write) Given the fact that it is a 10Gbps/USB 3.2 Gen 2 storage device, WD claims that the drive reaches 1.05GBps and 1GB in read and write speeds sequentially and we did manage to hit those numbers in CrystalDiskMark, one of the more popular synthetic storage benchmarks available. The heat dissipated by the NVMe controller and the NAND chips inside is rapidly evacuated by the metal casing. The WD My Passport external SSD runs hot, far hotter than we were expecting.

It can also go all the way to 2.4GBps which would make it a candidate for a theoretical USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 version of the drive that would adopt a 20Gbps interface (and potentially USB4/Thunderbolt 3). It is worth noting the SN550 tops at 1TB whereas the My Passport SSD goes to 2TB. Internally, this is the SN550E, a PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe drive that pairs an ASMedia ASM2362 bridge with a SanDisk 20-82-10023 controller and SanDisk BiCS 4 96L 3D TLC flash memory. No status light to indicate if the device is operating, which is an odd omission. It has a Type-C connector with a short Type-C to Type-C cable (plus a Type-A to type-C converter) thrown in the box.

My passport for mac review 2016