For comparison sake, at the time of this writing the WD My Passport SSD 1 TB external drive was around $130 while a comparable WD Elements HDD 1 TB drive was around $50.WD Drive Utilities is a lightweight program designed to lend you a hand with managing and configuring your Western Digital external HDD. The only drawback is they are more expensive.

With no moving parts, smaller size, and faster speeds, I’d recommend an SSD drive to anyone looking for an external hard drive. (This older drive has been going strong for 6 years now and is also pictured here in this post.) The WD My Passport SSD has one USB-C port and it comes with two cables, a USB-C to USB-C (perfect for Mac laptops) or a USB-C to USB-A. I’d say at least 50% faster to almost double the speed of my older WD MY Passport Ultra HDD. While I’m usually in no great rush, file transfers are much faster with the SSD drive.

It’s essential like a huge thumb drive that you plug in to your computer or laptop, and it runs off the power from this connection. My most recent upgrade was to a 1 terabyte Western Digital My Passport SSD or solid state drive ( shop at Amazon).

I have not had any problems with any of the WD external hard drives I’ve owned and they are all still working. At that point I moved on to Western Digital and am now on my third external hard drive from WD. More than a decade ago, I used other brands ( cough cough LaCie cough cough) only to have one hard drive overheat and fail.

This review is not a comprehensive look at external hard drives, but I wanted to share my years of experience using Western Digital external hard drives with no issues.

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