WD My Passport SSD (2020)

[Editor’s Note, August 17, 2023: As recently reported in Ars Technica, a critical mass of users on SanDisk’s forums and Reddit have reported failures of some SanDisk Extreme, Extreme Pro, Extreme V2, and Extreme Pro V2 SSDs, resulting in data loss, as well as the drives becoming unreadable/unmountable. In May, parent company WD released firmware updates for the 4TB SanDisk Extreme, as well as the 4TB, 2TB, and 1TB Extreme Pro models, plus the 4TB Western Digital My Passport, but complaints continue. As of today, however, we no longer recommend buying any of the aforementioned SSDs, until we are satisfied the issue has been resolved. (A class-action suit has been levied against WD surrounding issues with these drives.) We have left our original review in place here for reference.]

While the original WD My Passport SSD—the company’s first foray into external SSDs back in 2017—was a two-tone rectangular slab with Serial ATA-based innards, 2020’s iteration of the WD My Passport SSD is sleek, stylish, and faster. (It starts at $119.99 for a 500GB model, and is $189.99 for the 1TB version tested.) Under the hood, its support for PCI Express-bus and NVMe technology, paired with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 system-side interface, generates read and write speeds more than twice as fast as its predecessor's. Its speed, capacity, and 256-bit hardware encryption make it a good fit for either business or everyday media-shuffling use, and it grabs our latest Editors' Choice ring for mainstream external SSDs.

SSD: Small Snazzy Drive

With an anodized aluminum finish in your choice of four colors—gray, gold, red, or blue—and a textured wave pattern that covers most of the bottom and top, the 2020 edition of the My Passport SSD has a touch of elegance uncommon in external SSDs. It measures 0.4 by 3.5 by 1.8 inches (HWD) and has rounded corners. It's just larger than a credit card in both thickness and its longest dimension, and it weighs just 1.7 ounces.

The drive is one of the more compact external SSDs we have encountered—smaller and lighter than the Crucial X8 and the latest SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, similar in weight and dimensions to the ADATA SE800, and slightly longer and a smidge heavier than the Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch and Samsung Portable SSD T7.

On our test unit, the top looked silver-gray and was slightly shinier than the bottom side. The top sports the WD logo, indented in a raised rectangle. On one end, well offset from the center, is the drive’s only port, which takes a USB Type-C cable (more on this shortly). The My Passport SSD lacks a status light, so you will have to check your computer to see if a file transfer, download, or other operation is in progress or complete.

According to WD's ratings, the drive is shock and vibration resistant, and drop resistant up to 6.5 feet, making it reasonably durable, though it lacks a formal ingress protection (IP) rating. This means that it has not been tested for water or dust resistance—unlike the Editors' Choice-winning ADATA SE800, whose IP68 rating means it’s completely protected from dust and can survive a dunk in 1 meter or more of water. As insurance against potential mishaps, though, WD does back the My Passport SSD with a generous five-year warranty. That will replace the drive but not your data, so be sure to back that up elsewhere.

A potential downside of SSDs versus traditional, spinning hard drives is a tendency to generate some heat under sustained operation. I noticed that after using the My Passport for a long period of transferring files, it became warm to the touch, and slightly uncomfortable to hold when I squeezed it. The metal casing was doing its job as a heat sink.

That said, SSDs are so much faster than hard drives, and the capacities smaller, that your read and write operations tend to be over sooner. That factor allows for less time for the drive to heat up in the first place.

A Competitive List Price

The 2020 My Passport SSD is competitively priced among the external SSDs of its class. It lists at 19 cents per gigabyte for the 1TB model we tested, and the 500GB model at 24 cents per gigabyte. WD also offers a 2TB model ($359.99 list) for 18 cents a gigabyte, so the savings are marginal should you spring for the largest capacity.

At Amazon, you can get the 1TB version of the drive for 16 cents per gig or less depending on the day. It is list-priced lower than the 1TB versions of the ADATA SE800 (26 cents per gig) and the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD (25 cents per gig), both of which are ruggedized, as well as the Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch with its fingerprint-reader security (at 23 cents per gig). The non-touch T7 lists at the same price as the My Passport SSD, while the Crucial X8 lists for a little less (16.5 cents per gig).

The drive comes with installers for WD Discovery for both Windows and macOS. From WD Discovery, you can transfer files to and from other drives—including WD’s network-attached My Cloud Home cloud-storage device—and back up your computer’s hard drive. (The transfer function is no big deal—it simply opens up File Explorer, which you could have done on your own.)

You can also set a password to enable the drive’s 256-bit AES hardware encryption—which is faster and more secure than software-based encryption, albeit not as convenient as the fingerprint security on the Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch. It's also possible to unlock the drive specifically for use on the computer on which you set it up, so you don’t have to enter the password each time you connect it to that machine.

The My Passport SSD comes preformatted in the exFAT file format, which means it should work with Windows, macOS, and Android systems out of the box. It comes with a short (6-inch) USB Type-C-to-C cable, plus a USB Type-C-to-A adapter for connecting to computers that lack a USB-C port. The adapter is tiny, so be careful you don't misplace it. Generally, a pair of cables (one C-to-C, one C-to-A) is a more convenient solution.

The connection type is USB 3.2 Gen 2, which supports a maximum throughput of 10Gbps. WD rates the drive for a peak read speed of 1,050MBps and a maximum write speed of 1,000MBps, and in our Crystal DiskMark 6.0 testing, it came very close to that, testing at 1,066MBps read and 954MBps write...

This is about twice as fast as previous-generation drives based on SATA internals, such as the original My Passport SSD. (That kind of drive necessarily peaks at around 550MBps due to the limitations of SATA itself.) The current model’s scores are within the fairly narrow test-score range in which most USB 3.2 Gen 2 drives land, though consistently closer the top of it. Among a select group of drives we compared it with, the My Passport SSD’s read and write scores were in line with other 1TB USB 3.2 Gen 2 drives we have recently tested, such as the Crucial X8, the Samsung Portable SSD T7 Touch, and the SanDisk Extreme SSD (2020). As noted earlier, the My Passport SSD 2020 supports the NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) data-transfer protocol, for accessing SSDs over a PCI Express bus, which helps ensure fast transfer rates. (Click here to see how we test SSDs.)

WD Has Your Back

With your choice of four colors and a textured, anodized-aluminum frame, the compact WD My Passport SSD 2020 is uncommonly handsome as SSDs come. Its leading-edge connectivity, and the supporting silicon inside, more than double its read and write speeds over the previous My Passport SSD generation, in line with other 1TB USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSDs we have tested recently.

Although it doesn't have the easy-unlock-it convenience of the fingerprint reader found on the Samsung T7 Touch, the My Passport SSD 2020 does support 256-bit AES hardware encryption, which is both fast and very secure (provided you set a good password). Though the drive has some durability features, it doesn't go full-on ruggedized like the ADATA SE800, and that drive remains our pick for value in a ruggedized external SSD.

Still, the WD is protected by an unusually long five-year warranty, and it sells at an aggressively low cost per gig. Factoring in its cost, speed, attractive design, and exceptional warranty, the WD My Passport SSD (2020) becomes our latest Editors' Choice winner for mainstream external SSDs.