WD My Passport Ultra Metal Edition 1 TB Silver

Screen Shot 2014-09-01 at 12.03.55 PMThis is a very small, cool-looking, and well-built portable hard drive. In terms of performance it is probably one of the best such storage devices that I’ve come across, including many of its much larger alternatives. Here are some of my impressions.

**** Design and Build ****

This is not the slimmest small external hard drive that I’ve come across. My Seagate Slim hard drive is a tad thinner in every dimension, but overall this is a very small and compact external hard drive. The cool aluminum metallic enclosure looks very well built and extremely durable. It certainly seems capable of preventing accidental bumps and scratches from damaging this hard drive, but I am not sure how much of a protection it provides from the drops. This looks and feels like a very high quality, reliable product.

**** Performance ****

This is a USB 3.0 connected hard drive, and it really shows. Transferring large, multi-gig files was a breeze. I did not actually bother to time the performance, but it was quite noticeably faster than what I had come to expect from my old legacy 2.0 USB drives. It took a while for it to backup all of my files (several hundred GB worth) from my old Mac, but that probably had to do more with its aging hardware than the intrinsic limitations of either this hard drive or the USB 3 connection.

**** Software ****

I actually didn’t bother installing the software that this had drive came with. From my experience no hard drive manufacturer provides the storage/backup software that is as capable as the stand-alone such software packages, or even the software that comes with your computer. This is particularly true if you own a Mac. As a rule of thumb Mac backup and storage software is usually inferior to the one that aims at the Windows PC users.

**** Conclusion ****

This is an extremely well built and high performance small external hard drive. The software is worthwhile if you are a Windows user, but for those of us with Macs its more or less irrelevant. Nonetheless, I’ve been very happy with it thus far.

 

Bojan Tunguz

Bojan Tunguz was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which he and his family fled during the civil war for the neighboring Croatia. Over the past two decades he has studied, lived and worked in the United States. He is a theoretical physicist with degrees from Stanford and University of Illinois. Tunguz has taught physics at several prominent liberal arts colleges and has been writing about physics, science and technology for more than a decade. He also has a wide spectrum of interests, and reads and writes about current events, society, culture, religion and politics. Over the years he has reviewed many of the books that he has read, and posted his reviews on various online outlets. In 2011 he had become a top 10 reviewer on Amazon.com, where he continues to be very active. Aside from reading and writing, Tunguz enjoys traveling, digital photography, hiking, and fitness. He resides with his wife in Indiana. You can follow my review updates on the following pages as well: Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tunguzreview Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tunguzreviews Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104312842297641697463/posts

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