Features:

  • Designed for Mac and Time Machine ready
  • Password protection with hardware encryption
  • Trusted drive built with WD reliability
  • USB 3.0 port; USB 2.0 compatible
  • 3-year manufacturer's limited warranty
  • Formatted for Mac OS X; Formatted HFS High Sierra, Sierra or El Capitan.
Strong Performance and Value

I now own and use five different WD My Passport external hard drives. Each is a different size and were purchased in different years. My oldest is now 4 years old. So far, all have performed flawlessly and none (knock wood) have failed. Two are used as my Time Machine computer back-ups; one holds my considerable music library (so I can keep the media off my computer) and two hold back-ups to my 30,000+ photo archives. I am a Mac user and buy the ones pre-formatted for Mac, though it is quite easy to reformat a non-Mac version. I find the value and performance to be excellent all around and until one fails me, will always buy WD drives.

A very good choice!

I purchased this product as I have a MacBook. It’s very fast. Comes with a regular USB cable and a USB-C cable. This helps with the new MacBooks as you don’t need an adapter. Data transfer speed is great. The price and quality are satisfying! I do really enjoy using this product. Mostly all my data is on this device. It’s lightweight. The WD app helps making a better connection with it. I’ve read a lot of articles and reviews about this product before I purchased it, yet I am very satisfied.

How can this be so good?

I'm not the type who replaces equipment just to get a shiny new model. I'm still using an early 2009 Mac Mini and had a 9 year old WD external FireWire 800 external drive for Time Machine. I started having trouble with Time Machine backups a few months ago, and wasn't able to mount the old drive the other day. So, I searched for a replacement. I figure I'll likely upgrade my Mac within the next year or two and know Firewire is no longer "the thing". I figured I would need a drive with a USB-C connectivity, but still needed USB-2 for the current Mini. This WD My Passport (1 TB) seems to do all I really need for Time Machine. I ordered this drive yesterday, and was surprised when it was delivered in under 24 hours! First, I'm ammazed at the small size, truly a shirt pocket size. Plugged it in, and it mounted right away. Went into Disk Utility and divided it into two partitions, and it's currently downloading a copy via Time Machine. Yes, it's probably slower than my previous FireWire-800, but good enough, I hope, for my current needs. Great deal for the price!

User friendly, compact

I love that it works for my Mac straight out of the box. The installation software was straightforward too. I also like that there are two adapters, for both usb-c and the regular USB port. I haven't experienced any issues yet, but that's because I've only accessed it twice to offload files onto it. I was a little concerned on how it was packaged though, because it came through a bubble envelope, and I would think the merchants would want to keep products like an external hard drive from suffering from any impact caused to it that could impair it's performance. The cardboard packaging containing the hard drive was dented, but the hard drive itself seemed fine. It should have been shipped in a cardboard box with air pockets to minimise potential impact damage.

Good drive, easy setup; Suggestion: turn off the drive's sleep timer before using with TimeMachine

I've now used this drive for about half a week and so far it is working well. It was already formatted for the Mac, so when I plugged it in there was nothing to do - it mounted automatically (I am running macOS High Sierra, version 10.13.6). I like that there is no separate power supply - it runs off of the power from the USB port. I've connected it both to USB-C on a new Mac and USB-A on an older one, and it works well on both. I am running TimeMachine backups to it, plus I also use CrashPlan and set up the drive as a local destination. In addition, I've copied some large files to a folder on the drive. I've even set up sharing for a folder on the drive to save the TimeMachine backup for another Mac on my home network (see Apple's website for how to do that - you use Sharing in System Preferences). It all works. I did have one issue: the drive has a built-in sleep timer to power down the drive when not in use. This seemed to cause a problem with TimeMachine, which failed when making a backup overnight. I suspected the sleep timer because it is a common feature on many drives, and I've found it can cause problems. I used the WD Drive Utilities app and turned off the sleep timer, and the problem with TimeMachine hasn't recurred. I suspect that the drive's sleep timer is the cause of the many complaints I've seen here about the drive failing almost immediately after the first backup. By the way, the Mac itself has a setting under Energy Saver in System Preferences to put hard disks to sleep, and that is turned on. This setting does put the drive to sleep when not in use, and TimeMachine has no problem waking it up, even when the Mac connected over the network is running a TimeMachine backup. Maybe the real problem is that the Mac's setting to put hard drives to sleep and the drive's sleep timer don't play well together. Western Digital should look into this. The drive comes with an app called WD Discovery, and with that you can download other apps, including WD Drive Utilities. Other than using WD Drive Utilities to turn off the sleep timer, I didn't want to use the other features, and I've set WD Discovery not to run when I boot up.

Exactly what I was looking for

I needed a backup system for my iMacs. I did have a time capsule, but I wanted something independent for both Macs. Also, I had the other system for 9 years and needed an update. This was great because it was already set up for the Mac. (Other hard drives need to be reformatted for the Mac, this wasn’t the case on this hard drive) I highly recommend this.

Great Product

This product works flawlessly. I am not sure what Mac problems the one star rather had, but I had no problems. It backs up my MacBook Pro using Time Machine without problems!

Large Capacity, Fast

One of the largest capacity hard drive I purchased about 20years ago was a Maxtor 30gb drive which costs about $230. With the incredible development of technology, we can can large capacity hard drives for way cheaper. Capacity we don't always use. This hard drive is one of the Best and largest capacity hard drives in the market. I will be giving some things I like and some things I believe can be improved upon. Likes: - Large Capacity, which I won't be using all of that extra space. It makes it very handy and great for backup. - Portable to carry around. - USB 3.0 which makes transfer fast. - I've connected it to an Apple Airport via USB. It was seamless, no configuration needed and read the Hard Drive automatically. - Can be used as a TimeMachine Backup for the Mac and at the same time used as a spare hard drive for extra space. - Model was specifically for a Mac, but it can be used for a PC as well. It can be formatted to be used for either just a PC or just a Mac. - If connected to an Airport, you can schedule auto backups. Dislikes: - I felt the hard drive is a bit bulky. it's twice as thick as similar hard drives with a 1TB or 2TB capacity - Future models should begin to implement USB-C - This may be too much to ask, but since we are going into that direction, perhaps add WiFi. An Ethernet port will make it bulky, so wifi is fine. This is a feature with Apple discontinued AirPort devices, which has Wifi and Ethernet. If this will become a replacement, then would like to see this feature.

Pretty good for the price

I partitioned the drive. 500gb for external storage and 1.5tb for time machine. I completely reformatted the drive and encrypted both partitions. I do not know why everyone is giving this item 1 star I have had nothing but a good experience . No mounting issues, no failed back ups, no failed data transfers. I am using a MacBook Pro 13.3 2018 with Touch Bar. very good bang for buck hard drive. keep in mind it is not SSD so there are moving parts (as in spinning HD). As for durability it does not seem like it would dent fairly easily, but It not like I'm going to go rock climbing with it...

Versatile, light weight, and fast

I own four of these and have carried them all over the world to store video and photo files. If you are using a Mac, make sure you order the drive pre-formatted for Mac. I personally recommend them as I have found them to be reliable and easy to use.

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