The Saviour Of Toddler Photos: A Review Of The WD My Passport 4TB External Hard Drive

A WD My Passport external hard drive doesn’t sound very parenty I hear you ponder. This may be true, on the face of it, but indulge me for a few moments and all will become clear as I attempt to explain why an external hard drive is actually an essential part of every parent’s armoury. Well, perhaps not ‘essential’, but pretty damn useful all the same! Onwards – the revelation is but moments away…

Before I get carried away with talk of terrabytes and USB cables and clouds though, I should just point out that I was sent a WD My Passport 4TB external hard drive for the purpose of this review, but that all views are my own. Sorted.

Right then, I was going to tell you how this review links in with a parenting blog, wasn’t I?

Well since having Joshua the number of photographs and videos I’ve taken on my phone has risen at a ridiculous rate and my phone is regularly telling me that it has run out of storage space to squeeze anything else on there! I could of course (and have!) transferred masses of those photos onto my laptop, but that’s not particularly ideal if you want to show your photos off to your relatives or when you’re out and about.

The natural solution therefore is to get hold of an external hard drive, especially a pretty tiny one that can automatically back up all your photos and be easily carted around with you! Now that I’ve ‘nailed’ that particular query, let’s crack on with the review itself!

Unboxing

The WD My Passport hard drive comes in a pretty standard-looking cardboard box and inside you get the hard drive itself (would be pretty naff if didn’t contain a hard drive admittedly), a USB 3.0 cable to connect it to any USB port and a quick start guide. Long gone are the days when you would find a 500 page manual in 74 languages flopping out at you as you opened the box, but the manual can be found in the files that download themselves when you plug the device into your PC. As long as you can figure out that the USB sized cable goes into your USB sized port you can’t really go too far wrong!

Looks & Options

The hard drive itself is pretty dinky, coming in 3cm shorter than my Samsung Galaxy S7 and 1cm wider, so it certainly won’t take over your living room by its enormity. It comes in a range of colours (black, blue, orange, yellow, white and red!) to coordinate with your laptop / wallpaper / phone / nail varnish if you so wish it to. The one I have is black and you can’t really go too far wrong with black. I’m guessing you probably wouldn’t choose a hard drive based on its aesthetics, but if you do then you’ll be pleased to know that it’s nice and shiny, with an attractive diagonal lined pattern on the bottom half. It looks exactly like the photo in fact.

Technical Bits

More than likely you will be choosing a hard drive based on what it does rather than what it looks like. Well, this one does a lot, packing an impressive 4TB of space in its tiny frame. You may remember, like I do, that PCs in the mid 90s would be considered a beast if they had a hard drive with 500MB of storage space. I remember buying a 60MB hard drive expansion in the early 90s and thinking that it was going to revolutionise by computing life! Well this My Passport external hard drive has 4,000,000MB of storage. Yes, that’s 4 million MB in a box that’s smaller than an actual passport. Bizarre.

So what does 4TB get you these days?! 1.2 million digital photos, 1000 DVDs, or over 60,000 hours of digital music – so more than enough for what I would ever need it for and probably more than enough for you would ever need it for too!

It comes in around the £125 mark at most online retailers, which I think is pretty decent value considering what you get for your money! You can also get a 2TB version for about £75 and a 1TB one for about £60 on the Maplin website.

Speed

I tried this out for this review and transferred every one of my photos from my laptop on to the WD My Passport hard drive via the USB cable – about 7 years worth of photos! In total this was just under 0.4TB of photos, or 400GB if you prefer. It took just under 30 minutes to transfer the whole lot over, which seemed pretty speedy to me! I also dumped everything from my DropBox account onto it too and 1,300 photos took around 5 minutes, so again not bad at all. If you have a USB 3.0 compatible device to transfer your files from it can go as fast as 5GB per second! All photos open up really quickly and I’ve had no issues at all with it as yet.

Set up was a breeze – all you have to do is run the installation file and it does the rest itself. It has an auto backup feature, which means you can set a schedule and it will automatically backup whatever device you want to be backed up. You can also password protect your drive, so that if you were to lose it somewhere no-one would be able to spy on your embarrassing university photos,

Overall

All in all I can’t really think what else I would have wanted from an external hard drive – it’s small, it’s got masses of storage space, it’s quick, it’s quiet and it’s easy to use. Happy days! It also now means that I can take another 4,000 photos of Joshua tomorrow and not worry about running out of space. Lucky boy…