Adding a solid state drive to your laptop means faster transfer speeds, lower boot times, better battery life and the fact you can move it around without fear of the read/write head crashing into the platters. Now external SSD, are arriving to help with our portable storage needs, with Western Digital’s Password SSD now available in Australia.
The new drive is available in 256GB, 512GB and a massive 1TB version, and comes with WD Backup software that allows you to automatically back up to the drive, ensuring your backup regime doesn’t rely on humans terrible memory.
The drive is fast, with speeds of up to 515 MB/s, the fastest My Passport drive offered by the WD brand. While some manufacturers still aren’t on-board, looking at you Microsoft (specifically the Surface team), the drive uses USB Type-C and is USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gb/s) ready with a USB Type-C to Type-C cable. If you need to use it with an older machine, there’s an adapter to use with the more traditional USB Type-A ports found on many computers. The drive works great on PC or Mac and the My Passport SSD can become a secure storage location with 256-bit AES hardware encryption and password protection.
So robust is the drive, that you can abuse it with a 6 and half foot drop and a staggering 1500G of force (you will die well before this), to help keep precious data safe.
There’s no doubt SSD is an awesome technology and its great to see having external storage that leverages the speed and robustness provided by solid state, is not longer limited to the inside of your computer. This opens the door to buy smaller SSDs from OEMs, and simply use the external SSD for larger local storage needs, without compromising on speed.
WD are pitching the My Passport SSD as a perfect storage solution to rapidly manage large photo and video libraries, quickly back up files and important documents, or even run virtual machines from.
Pricing and Availability
The My Passport SSD is backed by a three-year limited warranty and is available from Officeworks stores across Australia with an RRP of $199 for the 256GB version, while the 512GB costs $329 and $649/1TB. That’s certainly a premium for an external SSD drive, but hey, the slick design may help you justify some of that cost.
