Western Digital My Passport Slim Review

Western Digital My Passport Slim

The Western Digital My Passport Slim is one of the latest portable storage from the hard drive manufacturing giant. It is available in two different capacities - 1TB and 2TB, for this review I got the former.

USB Cable

Soft Pouch

Quick Install Guide

My Passport Slim Unit

The retail package includes the Portable Hard Drive with WD SmartWare Pro Software, Soft Pouch, USB Cable and Quick Install Guide.

My Passport Slim versus Essentials

My Passport Slim versus Essentials

The first thing you will notice about the unit is the remarkably small built in a very good looking aluminum enclosure. This metal body together with the cobalt casing around the sides ensures protection against accidental bumps, knocks and drops.

When compared to the My Passport Essentials, you will immediately notice the size difference. The actual dimensions are 110mm x 80mm x 12.3mm which translates to a very pocket-able size.

USB Port and LED Light

The Passport Slim supports USB 3.0 but it is also backward compatible with USB 2.0. You can immediately use it out of the box (with the supplied cable) just plug it to your personal computer since it is NTFS formatted by default.

If you are using a Mac, it can read the contents of the drive, but you won't be able to write anything on it unless you reformat the disk into HFS+ or exFAT. To do so, you can use the WD Drive Utilities on the My Passport Slim.

Other software included are the WD Security and WD SmartWare Pro. The first one lets you encrypt anything on the hard drive with 256-bit password while the latter makes it easy to back up as well as sync your files to the cloud storage.

During our test, it produced a result of 32Mbps write and 37Mbps read when connected to a USB 2.0 port. When using USB 3.0, the speeds jack up to 121Mbps for both read and write. In real life scenario, 2GB file transfer from it to the PC was finished in about 30 seconds while the other way around is about 35 seconds (USB 3.0). Using the USB 2.0 interface, it managed to do it around 2 minutes and 2.7 minutes respectively.


CONCLUSION:

The overall design is very attractive, elegant looking and would appeal even to those consumers who value design over anything else. The build quality is also solid and feels very sturdy. The software included are valuable and useful, especially to those novice users. Performance wise, it is one of the fastest USB 3.0 portable drive in the market.

The Western Digital My Passport Slim is a worthy upgrade if you are coming from a USB 2.0 back up storage and an excellent buy for those who does not own one.