western digital passport hard drives

Customer reviews

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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2018

Verified Purchase

Just want to add in a review with the ps4 tag so people can easily see it when they search for "will this work for ps4" and such.

You do not need to do the preformatting as originally described by many. You also should not pay more for the "ps4 version" of this drive. My experience with this was surprisingly smooth and easier than expected. Turned on my ps4, plugged in the hdd, and 2 notifications popped up
-Discover:You can use your external drive as storage
-Unsupported drive format.

If you go onto the discover notification it gave me the option to format it and it was faster than any formatting windows has ever done on a drive especially one of this capacity.

Long story short, ps4 will preformat this for you once you plug it in and confirm it to do so. Once formatting is done it will give you the works about how installing on external storage works and for me it set it as the new default.

Things to keep in mind:
-Only game data is stored on the ext drive.
-Saves, screenshots, videos etc are still on local storage
-Check storage settings to switch between which should be default installation drive.

Customer image

Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2017

Verified Purchase

Bought a 4TB drive on Feb 26th had been working great until yesterday when out of no where it stopped working and my computer wont recognize it anymore. The light is on and I can hear the drive spinning but several computers wont recognize it. I contacted Western Digital and a new was being sent however data recovery is not normally part of the warranty. I called Western Digital back the next day to talk about the data recovery and why this isn't covered on a device that is 2 months old. I spoke to Eunice (A++ service) she talked to her supervisor, because my device is only 2 months old Western Digital stepped up and did the right thing and is allowing me to send the device back to them to have the data recovered and placed onto a new 4TB My passport drive at no charge. It was going to cost me $400-$900 from a 3rd party company if Western Digital did not allow me to send it back to have the data recovered. Thank you for standing behind your product and doing the right thing I will purchase more drives from you in the future because of your actions today. Thank you SO MUCH Eunice from Western Digital and your supervisor your understanding and doing the right thing is much appreciated you now have a loyal customer for life.

Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2018

Verified Purchase

People buy these hard drives expecting reliability, this disks are made to transport data, not to make lifelasting originals of the most sacred memories. These mechanical discs break, and you can restore your data every time, but you will have to pay for a specialist a lot of money.
Alternatives to these disks: dvd, if you burn a dvd it will be way more reliable than a hard drive, burn many if you need 4tb. Another alternative is 2 or 3 of these disks with copies of your data, if one dies you can buy another and transfer the data and always have 2 or 3 copies.
4tb of your most preciated pictures and videos are worth more than 100bucks, so use one of this options or pay for cloud.
You can check and will find that all these drives have the same score in the reviews and the people complain about the same, people just keep thinking these drives are a safe storage, they couldn't be more wrong.
Having this said, the disks are working great, I'm leaving some pictures.
vote helpful it it was for you

Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2017

Verified Purchase

The drive stopped being detected in under three months. It spins and sounds fine, but Windows does not see it, nor does the WD software, and neither does the Linux kernel via lsusb. Therefor, I conclude that the internal bridge adapter (which converts USB to SATA) has failed. One can't even dismantle the enclosure and connect the drive to SATA, because the bridge is integrated onto the drive, which is a very consumer-hostile thing to do.

I don't particularly want to send WD the data on this drive, so I'm screwed. Buyer beware, Avoid this product.

Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2018

Verified Purchase

BEWARE! Shame on me for purchasing yet another inferior WD product. I spent over $100.00 for this item, and it worked 4 times over a couple of months. Now it just clicks and is not recognized by any of my hardware (Windows PC, tablet, etc.), and I can't access any of the files I trusted were safely backed up. I think that I would be safe to assume that ANY product should last more that a few weeks. Congratulations on your pricey new brick!
HERE'S THE DRILL. I contacted WD for a replacement, only to find out that I would have to find and purchase special packaging to return it. Then after spending time and money boxing it up for return, I have to find a shipping company, deliver it there, pay shipping costs, all of this AT MY EXPENSE, and all for a product that should have worked anyways. Not to mention that I will have to send them a hard drive that contains backups of all of my personal information (emails, tax documents, photos, etc.) because I can't access the drive to wipe this sensitive information. All of this seems like a lot of trouble and concern for trusting customers of a product that was poorly manufactured to begin with. Clearly WD has a lot to learn about quality customer service.
NEVER AGAIN! I have had similar issues with WD products in the past (this has happened TWICE before!), and I supposed that I was too trusting of a company that repeatedly manufactures inferior products, then puts their customers through costly hoops to return them. Had I spent a little time researching other reviews of WD products, I would have realized that I am not alone. Many similar issues are reported through these reviews, and any potential customers would be wise to pay attention.
As I stated at the beginning.....BEWARE!
WD 4TB Black My Passport Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBYFT0040BBK-WESN

Top reviews from other countries

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't forget to perform Extended SMART test

Reviewed in India on February 1, 2018

Verified Purchase

(Refer Cons for a very important thing to perform on these HDD as soon as you receive them though that test would take about 11-12 Hours but you will be sure your Data is safe)
Update: Empty/Brand-New HDD with no data should take only about 4 Hours for test to complete (1 Hour per 1TB), if HDD is completely full(data) then it would take about 11-12 hours to complete the test.
Would suggest to run test after filling it up completely.
Also, don't move the HDD while its running and dropping it from height can damage it .. Head could hit the platter leading to Physical Bad Sectors and Data Loss. (Minor Safety Measures)

Pros:
1. Transfer Rates (About 115 MB/s Reads and about 90-110 MB/s Write Speeds | Also reads/writes depends on how data is on the HDD Fragmented or Defragmented)
2. Looks Good from outside
3. Capacity of about 3.63 TB Usable.
4. Cheapest option in India if you want to store large amount of data at a low price/don't want an Internal Drives/NAS Drives which you can access anytime, factors why would you prefer this over NAS/Internals: Power outages & you don't have power backup(assuming you have a laptop), want to save 2-3k INR.(You can buy a number of these)
5. 3 years Warranty from the Date of purchase (Make sure to head to the WD website and register you product)

Cons:
- I wanted to give this My Passport HDD a 2 Star, but cannot let my personal experience to affect this drive.... (But don't know if its just me with this kind of unfortunate experience)
- I Bought two 4TB WD My Passports from Amazon in a span of 2 months...
- And it took me about 1 Month 26 Days to fill up 4TB..
- After which i realized one of my HDD had Bad Sectors... and i lost about 64GB of data due to it
- And then while i was creating a RMA on WD Website...
- I thought lets run the SMART Extended Test on my another healthy My Passport HDD and i was suprised my 2nd HDD had Bad Sectors as well

How to perform this Test which checks for Bad Sectors/Phyically Damaged Sectors:
1. Download :
Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic from WD Website
2. Install, Connect your My Passport HDD, Launch the program.
3. Double click(left click) your My Passport Drive from the list of drives.
4. A Menu pops-up, Click Extended Test. Another pop-up will appear Click OK. ( Make sure no program is using your My Passport HDD)
5. Let it run would take about 11-12 Hours to complete and if it finds too many Bad Sectors Program will abort with error.
(If you have some different error you can google "Data Lifeguard Diagnostics Error Code List" and find what kind of error you are getting..)
6. If It aborts you know you need to Return the drive or you need to get it replaced under warranty.

2.0 out of 5 stars Mal comienzo con Western Digital - Tiempo perdido

Reviewed in Spain on December 10, 2017

Verified Purchase

Es curioso, lo mismo me ocurre a mi y lo he recibido el dia 5 de diciembre y NO PUEDO UTILIZARLO, Entiendo que Western Digital no debiera enviar este tipo de artículos sin garantía plena de funcionamiento . Amazon me lo repone sin problema, pero el trastorno de trabajo ya no tiene solución 4 días tirados a la basura para que luego no me permita copiar lo que tenia preparado.WD My Passport - Disco duro portátil de 4 TB y software de copia de seguridad automática, color negro