Western Digital 4TB Blue My Passport Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3 0 - Western DigitalBYFT0040BBL-WESN

I've used WD passports in the past and at least the ones I owned have been fairly reliable...so far so good with WD external drives. I moved to My Books as the passports didn't go past a few TBs and the WD My Book's larger drive size was also cheaper per TB but since then as with all technology things change and the My Passport now comes in a 4TB size that's only about $10 more than the 4TB My Book at the writing of this review. I'll also be moving to cloud services soon as a secondary backup as I've lost pictures when my laptop crashed so I don't want to solely depend on external drives anymore even if WDs have been reliable in the past as things can happen. I chose the blue color to start and plan to order more in other colors so I can tell the drives apart. I love the size and portability. While the My Book can potentially provide more drive space it isn't as small or portable and the Passport so I've missed this little guy. It was basically plug and play on Windows 10 and so far it is working seamlessly with Windows 10. In fact I just moved a bunch of folders in Adobe Lightroom onto it and there were no problems. Link to 8TB My Book if you're interested: WD 8TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBBGB0080HBK-NESN I have a USB hub and with the My Books if I plugged more than one in at the same time it wouldn't read them at the same time, only one drive at a time could be recognized. With the passport it reads it separately from the My Book drives I have so I can transfer files back and forth and as they're USB 3 transfer is pretty good which is great for my workflow! I've just received my drive so I will update this review if I have anything to add or run into any problems. I snapped a few pics of the box and the drive. The box isn't anything fancy if you're looking to store the drive in it. It measures around 4.5"x6.25" The box came in a sleeve to show the color of the drive inside. The drive and connection cord was in a brown insert that reminded me of those brown grey paper egg cartons. The cord looks to be around 15 to 16 inches and the drive itself around 4.25x3.25 inches. The housing is blue plastic and came protected in clear wrap which was easy to remove. I seem to remember my first Passport had a metal and plastic housing but I guess all plastic perhaps is a bit lighter. There was a multi language insert for the warranty and tech support info and a paper insert that just had the website for help. There's a pic of the bottom showing it has small square rubber feet at the corners to help protect whatever surface you put it on. The plug and on light are on the bottom side of the drive. Hopes this helps potential purchasers. Read more

Over the years, these external hard drives have had their storage capacity become larger and larger. While this one doesn't have the largest capacity available on a portable hard drive (a Seagate model has 5 TB), it is the least costly one per Terabyte at the present time. I bought four (4) of these drives (the blue ones were the least costly at the time of purchase) in order to back up the data from my "main" computer. I had formerly used 2 TB portable drives but I can use those drives for something else. Having four of these drives (plus one more 2 TB one which I keep in our safety deposit box at our bank), all of which have the same backed-up data, pretty much ensures that I'm not going to lose any of my data, pictures, music, or other information. I have to tell you that backing up to these drives is MUCH faster than backing up to those other, older, drives. I'm sure that has something to do with these drives being formatted as GUID whereas the older ones were MBR. I have read that some of these fail; you read that about ALL computer hard drives. In my own experience, I have had exactly one (1) hard drive completely fail and that was after quite of few years of extensive use. (It was a WD one; I have never had a Seagate drive fail but I generally buy WD drives.) My total data comes to a bit over 400 GB (that does not include all of my music or my movies which I keep on separate hard drives - but it does include all of my home videos, much of my music, and all of my photographs). My computer has a GNU/Linux operating system and this drive, as all drives I have ever owned, works perfectly with the OS. I did reformat this WD drive to an encrypted EXT4 file system. Of course I cannot comment on longevity of these four drives. Should anything untoward happen with any one (or more) of them, I shall report that here. However, as I do not anticipate any trouble, I shall give these WD 4 TB portable external hard drives my highest recommendation. Thank you for reading this and for considering my opinion. Lawrence H. Bulk Read more