

It's part of the company's new design that it has rolled out across its My Passport hard drives and My Book desktop external drives. The My Passport SSD looks different from drives of yesteryear we've seen from WD. (You also get an adapter for use with ordinary Type-A USB ports.) If you're already tingling with excitement and want to run out and get one, you had better head to a Best Buy, as that's the only reseller that will be selling them, both in its physical stores and online. This "flashy" new drive (pardon the pun) offers unique styling, a reasonable price at each capacity, a useful software suite, and a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface with a Type-C connector, for transfer speeds as fast those of as an internal SATA SSD. Given WD's acquisition of SanDisk and that company's strong position in flash memory and SSDs, external SSDs are a natural progression. This is the company's first external SSD and is available in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities.
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The My Passport SSD ($399 MSRP in the model tested) follows on in branding from the company's platter-based My Passport portable hard drives. (Opens in a new window) Read Our Gnarbox Review The WD My Passport SSD is the latest to hit our test bench. Now that prices on internal SSDs have gotten a lot more competitive while capacities have gone up, we're starting to see more external SSDs at palatable prices. That's due to SSDs' high cost per gigabyte and thus necessarily low capacity-although the trend is moving in a more favorable direction. That makes them the ideal containers for data inside mobile devices so does their ruggedness and their ability to withstand punishment.ĭespite all these advantages, when it comes to external storage, the mobile-storage world is still largely populated by spinning disks. By their flash-memory nature, they have no moving parts, and under most circumstances emit very little heat.

We certainly love them in our desktop PCs, but they are making just as big an impact in the mobile world. Solid state drives (SSDs) have been stomping a giant footprint onto the storage world over the past few years-a size 14 EEE boot worn by some tiny, tiny chips. Unwelcome sales pushes inside WD Discovery app.Gen 2 speed benefit was minimal in our tests.
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