WD My Passport SSD 256GB Review

The My Passport SSD is the lastest member of a large family of portfolio of external drives produced by WD, and needless to say with an SSD inside it, is the fastest My Passport drive to date.

Not only does the drive look good (although the metallic part of the finish attracts finger prints like a moth to a flame) and perform well, it's pretty tough too, designed to survive a drop of 1.98m.

The official performance transfer rate figure for the drive is up to 515MB/s which we were able to confirm with the ATTO benchmark, which produced a read score of 517MB/s and 531MB/s for writes. Real life file transfers saw read performance touch the 500MB/s mark on a couple of occasions; when dealing with the 100GB data file and 60GB iso image. However, the write performance of the My Passport SSD was left somewhat in the shade producing just over 200MB/s for most of the tests with the exception of the 60GB Steam Folder (187.4MB/s) and the 50GB file folder (162.6MB/s).

The drive does support the TRIM command but it needs to be reformatted from the out of the box exFAT file system to NTFS. Another useful feature especially for a drive that can be carried around and could be prone to be either lost or stolen is the 256-bit hardware encryption which is set up via WD's Security app.

In addition to the security app the drive also comes with WD's Backup software as well as access to some useful 3rd party apps including Acronis True Image, Plex, easet DriveSecurity, which is antivirus software for external drives and the Blancco File Eraser app.

We found the 256GB My Passport SSD available for pre-ordering at Overclockers UK for £109.99 HERE

Pros

• Performance.
• Physical Size.
• Hardware encryption.
  

Cons

• Pricey compared to other My Passport drives.
  

Kitguru says: It may not have the capacity of some of its larger siblings but the diminutive My Passport SSD outshines them all in the peformance front.

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