The transfer speed with these little portable drives is just not something I’m accustomed to on a PC (as opposed to my external Mac drives, which have always been Firewire-equipped). While I’ve purchased several of the desktop versions of the drives, Western Digital recently sent me one of the portable My Passport USB 3.0 drives to take for a test drive. And, once you setup the backup, you can just forget about it. The automatic backup interface is not quite as slick as Apple’s Time Machine however, it’s still easy. While there are more elegant options for local backup, the price of these drives, combined with Western Digital’s easy backup software make it a decent solution for external PC storage. I’ve been using one drive as a production drive and a second drive as a backup drive for the data on the production drive. Of course, I would be better off with a local SSD drive to work from, but that’s not quite practical or affordable enough for me. The speed of these things are so fast that I’ve been editing photos and video files from Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects directly from the drives. I just picked up a pair of 1TB drives for less than $80 each at a local retailer.
WD MY BOOK EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE REVIEW INSTALL
Now, the thing that makes them so great is that more and more PCs are shipping with USB 3.0 compatibility, which means you don’t have to install a USB 3.0 PCIe card (although you can still find combos of these drives that come with a free PCIe card for your computer). I’ve been more than happy with with performance, price and durability of these drives over the past year or so.
I was an early adopter to USB 3.0 on my PC and I’ve been using Western Digital USB 3.0 drives since shortly after they became available.