WD My Passport

This mechanical drive is sluggish, but it’s rich in features and the prices are second to none

SCORE

PRICE 4TB, £68 (£82 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/324wd1

READ SPEED 111MB/ SEC

WRITE SPEED 105MB/ SEC

The My Passport is Western Digital’s portable mechanical offering. As usual with this type of drive, it’s designed for a bulk storage role, and the company’s marketing doesn’t make any claims about performance at all.

That’s probably wise. For sequential operations the My Passport is this month’s slowest drive, delivering a read rate of just 111MB/sec. It evaded last place in the PCMark data disk test, but the margin was tiny: in terms of the overall user experience, this is as slow as it gets.

Still, the My Passport has strengths elsewhere. Unlike Toshiba’s Canvio drives it supports 256-bit hardware encryption, and its footprint is a tad smaller. The 19mm depth is on the chunky side, but in our opinion it’s a more attractive drive overall. Alongside the standard black design, WD offers models with sky blue and bright red front panels: the former looks rather chic, while the latter looks like it fell out of the 1980s – take your pick.

The My Passport undercuts Toshiba on price too. The 4TB drive we tested costs just £82, which is equivalent to 2.2p per gigabyte, while the gigantic 5TB model can be picked up for £98, squeezing the price down to 2.1p/GB.

It bears repeating that you shouldn’t be considering a mechanical drive for any role where performance is remotely important. But if you don’t need the performance and expense of an SSD then the WD My Passport’s eye-catching design, decent feature set and unbeatable price make it our pick of the mechanical portables.