I for one will be happily buying these fast “second class” devices at a discount. It always makes me laugh how tech that was the latest and greatest (and was priced very much accordingly) is talked about like it’s absolute garbage a few years after it comes out.
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Western Digital Launches New NVMe 'My Passport SSD' With Transfer Speeds Up to 1050MB/s
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Trust no single drive with the only copy of anything important. That’s like the first rule of storing your data.
Here's what I would really like (but nobody is going to build it): I'd like to upgrade the hard drive inside my MacBook, but with newer MacBooks that's unfortunately too difficult, so it's not going to happen. So what I want instead is an external drive that is connected to my MacBook, as permanently as possible. It will never be removed. I don't want it on the table. I want it in a safe place when I'm on the train, for example.
To do this: A very thin device. some material as my MacBook, that is glued permanently to the back of the screen. Edges smooth so it doesn't catch if I move it in and out of my bag. And a cable that is designed to go round the corner from the back of the screen to a USB port on the side of my Mac (not a straight cable that you have to bend, but one where the bend is part of the cable.
Result: You open your MacBook, and the hard drive is there. And since it doesn't have to look like a hard drive, it can be smaller and flatter. For extra goodness, a USB port at the back so you can attach two of them.
To do this: A very thin device. some material as my MacBook, that is glued permanently to the back of the screen. Edges smooth so it doesn't catch if I move it in and out of my bag. And a cable that is designed to go round the corner from the back of the screen to a USB port on the side of my Mac (not a straight cable that you have to bend, but one where the bend is part of the cable.
Result: You open your MacBook, and the hard drive is there. And since it doesn't have to look like a hard drive, it can be smaller and flatter. For extra goodness, a USB port at the back so you can attach two of them.
Well, the Lexar SL100 Pro 1TB is more or less in the same leauge but I bought that over a year ago for roughly the same price as the 1TB WD version and the drive is about half the size. Looks like WD is just playing catch up to me.
Arstechnica has a very detailed reviews on most major SSD players' products
arstechnica.com
Guidemaster: The best portable SSDs you can buy right now
Which portable SSDs are worth your time and money? We tested a bunch to find out.
arstechnica.com
Surprises me that nvme NAS devices are so hard to come by. Went the enclosure route and hooked it up to a Pi4 for an alternative to QNAP.
WD My Passport design reminds me of iPhone 3G/3GS. To me, I prefer more modern design of Samsung T7, but this looks at least better than SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD.
Either way, I would personally buy whichever is the cheapest, which at this moment is Samsung T7.
Now bring on capacities larger than 2TB.
| Samsung T7 | Samsung T7 Touch | SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD | WD My Passport SSD | |
| 500GB | $109.99 (on sale at $79.99) | $129.99 (on sale at $109.99) | $189.99 (on sale at $107.99) | $119.99 |
| 1TB | $199.99 (on sale at $169.99) | $229.99 (on sale at $189.99) | $279.99 (on sale at $189.99) | $189.99 |
| 2TB | $369.99 (on sale at $319.99) | $399.99 (on sale at $359.99) | $429.99 (on sale at $349.99) | $359.99 |
Unless you have a 10gig network... NVMe drives would be overkill for NAS devices.
Standard gigabit networks are the bottleneck... they only transfer data at 100 MB/s
That's quite a bit slower than the 3,000 MB/s of NVMe drives....
The same price on Amazon. I’m not sure what WD is thinking with this one. Of course they can probably put it in some store and because it looks flashy people will buy it.
I have had some WD HDDs fail on me, but a bunch of other big brands' HDDs has failed on me as well.
I personally think that failure rates of the popular brands' HDDs have more to do with model-specific issues than brand-related.
A samsung t7 non-touch 2tb is the same speed, but $79 cheaper, and a smaller form factor. WD just doesn’t understand the market.
My point is we are months away from a new standard and WD could have released these products in the past year. No one is saying the current standard becomes “garbage” When USB4 is released.
When it comes to storage, reliability is the key selling point. Nothing is worse than a failed storage, and these storage manufacturers are pumping them out like Popcorn. There is only like 3-4 HDD manufacturers with no guarantees of quality. The idea is buy several and hope one survives.
I am not sure how SSDs fare but I have yet to hear of a failed SSD.
I am not sure how SSDs fare but I have yet to hear of a failed SSD.
Yep. T7 delivers the same speeds at the same price point, and, based on the pictures, in a smaller form factor.
I’ve only ever had one WD drive fail and to be fair, I dropped it a couple of times (it was the most unlucky drive). In fact I’ve still got WD drives from nearly 20 years ago. They’re slow by today’s standards but they spin up and read/write just fine.
Unless I’m mistaken, these have been available in Europe for at least 2 years. The Amazon listing has over 1,000 reviews and questions from 2018. How is this only coming to USA now?
I’ve seen Amazon release products that get reviews from previous generation products.
The drives you see getting 1000 reviews from 2018 are probably not NVNE drives.
You are 100% correct - Amazon UK has just updated the product page for the old square WD SSD Passport rather than adding it as a new product. That‘s so messed up.
Unless something has changed with Big Sur, MacOS does not have TRIM support for drives over USB.