Although competitors have been offering portable SSDs for some time, WD has finally ensured its plans to do the same have entered a solid state of reality.
There are a wide range of SSDs on the market, and they have become an extremely popular form of upgrade for older computers, making them run so fast they feel like new once more.
Indeed, old fashioned spinning hard drives have been relegated to large storage devices, at least for people that have made the transition to SSDs and flash memory in their computing devices.
But now, even portable spinning hard drives are seeing their dominance encroached, at long last, by yet another traditional hard disk maker offering a portable SSD drive, joining companies such as Samsung and others with offerings – and at the realistic sizes of 256GB, 512GB and 1TB.
{loadposition alex08}WD’s entry is dubbed the My Passport SSD, and as with other portable SSDs is described as being incredibly fast, in a sleek and compact design.
Promising “blazing-fast speeds and award-winning design,” WD says its “new My Passport SSD compliments the company’s leading portfolio of My Passport palm-sized storage devices.”
Of course, devices with traditional drives are larger than portable SSD models, and they’re still quite a bit more expensive than HDDs, but as they are effectively drop and shock-proof when compared to an HDD, and are so much faster, they clearly have great appeal.
Sven Rathjen, the vice-president of marketing for Client Solutions at WD, said: “The WD brand is focused on delivering fresh, new personal storage devices that offer amazing performance in a beautiful, yet durable design.
“Our fastest portable drive yet, the My Passport SSD is a powerful solution for people who need to move content quickly and easily wherever life takes them.”
WD’s portable SSD features “speeds of up to 515 MB/s” which leads WD to dubs its Passport SSD as “the fastest My Passport drive offered by the WD brand".
The drive is “designed for the latest generation of computers with a USB Type-CTM port and is USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gb/s) ready with a USB Type-C to Type-C cable and an adapter to use with the more traditional USB Type-A ports found on many computers".
Compatible with PCs and Macs, it offers “256-bit AES hardware encryption and password protection, and is also 6.5-foot drop tested for shock-resistance to withstand 1500G of force, to help keep precious data safe".
So, if you want to “rapidly manage large photo and video libraries, quickly back up files and important documents, run virtual machines from, or expand your SSD-laptop storage anywhere you take your computer,” then an SSD is the perfect solution – and vastly faster and more reliable than any mere hard drive.
Available with WD Backup software that enables you to automatically back up your stuff, the drives come with a “three-year limited warranty” and are available from Officeworks stores across Australia.
RRP Prices are:
- $199 for the 256GB model
- $329 for the 512GB model and
- $649 for the 1TB model.
Now, it has to be said that you can simply buy a regular 2.5-inch SSD and put it into a slim enclosure with USB-C (and an adapter for traditional USB slots) and spend less than the prices above.
However, you’ll end up with a larger device, but that may make it harder to lose. I had a 500GB 1st-gen Samsung SSD and managed to lose it somewhere, so incredibly slim and small it was, and that really annoyed me.
That said, WD’s drive looks a bit thicker than the almost too-slim Samsung drive, which is actually a good thing, while still obviously being ultra-portable.
Also these prices are RRP, presumably in a few months they will fall somewhat, although as they have only just been announced today, don’t expect any discounts just yet.
In the meantime, it’s great to see a new competitor in the SSD space.
Hard disk for consumer uses in terms of the C: drive in PCs and the main disk in Macs should no longer exist. If SSDs were cheaper still, HDDs would be banished from the internals of computers.
HDDs in large capacities are still wonderful for storing all your digital media and for making great back-ups. I have a 4TB portable hard drive and a 5TB desktop hard drive, and use these for back-ups along with cloud services.
But if you need a super fast portable drive that is like a flash drive on steroids, and which you can use for back-ups too, then a portable SSD drive is truly a wonderful thing, and something you will definitely own sometime soon, if you don’t already!
