The WD 5TB My Passport Portable Hard Drive is Western Digital’s pocket-sized backup drive, and five terabytes is enough room to hold years of photos, video, and documents without you having to sort through anything first. It’s bus-powered over USB, so there’s no wall adapter involved, just the included micro-USB to USB-A cable running to your computer. The connection is USB 3.2 Gen 1 (the same as USB 3.0), and it’s backward compatible with USB 2.0. Hardware encryption is built in at 256-bit AES, and WD covers the drive with a three-year limited warranty.
Head over to Amazon to get the WD 5TB My Passport Portable Hard Drive for just $225, down from its usual price of $285. That’s a $60 discount and 21% off.
A portable hard drive that’s got enough space for all your documents, photos, videos, and more
Cloud storage does a lot of what you used to store on an external drive, but it becomes impractical once you’re managing large volumes. Storing five terabytes of video or ten years’ worth of your RAW photos can cost you hundreds of dollars per year and take several days to transfer, whether or not you ever touch the files. The one-time cost of buying a drive versus the ongoing monthly fee you’re charged by cloud services, along with the speed of transferring your data over USB 3.0 rather than your internet upload rate, are two more reasons a cloud service may not be practical for you.
Unlike other forms of file security, which rely only on software encryption, Western Digital offers hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption. This form of encryption protects your data within the device itself. You use WD’s Security software to create a password for the encrypted drive, and after you set one, the drive won’t open unless you enter the correct password. Should you lose the drive or have it stolen, your files stay secure even if somebody else gains physical possession of it.
With WD you get Acronis True Image, which provides automatic backups. Once it’s set up, you don’t need to think about it again. You’ll choose how often you want a backup, and it’ll copy your files automatically, with added ransomware protection so that even if your computer gets hacked and encrypted, whatever you’ve backed up stays safe. WD also has WD Discovery, which lets you connect your external hard drive to cloud storage such as Google Drive or Dropbox, so you can keep a copy in both places.
The drive is 4.2 by 3 by 0.75 inches and weighs about half a pound, so it fits in a jacket pocket or a laptop sleeve. It arrives formatted NTFS for Windows, and a Mac needs it reformatted first, which takes a couple of minutes in Disk Utility.
Buying the WD 5TB My Passport Portable Hard Drive at $225 rather than $285 gets you the drive, the cable, and the software, and there’s nothing else to buy before you plug it in. This is a spinning hard drive rather than an SSD, so it’s slower than a flash drive and more sensitive to being dropped, which is the tradeoff for getting five terabytes at this price.
