My Passport Go – rugged and tough

Western Digital (WD) sent me a little something (My Passport Go) recently to review – we haven’t heard from them in a while, so this was a pleasant surprise.

Initially I wondered how I was going to review a hard drive, isn’t one just as good as the next but spend a few weeks with the WD My Passport Go and you soon get used to having great quality on hand.

The My Passport Go is a tough and rough SSD, built to take on your travels.

Design

Let’s start with the design. This WD SSD is an all plastic design, making it pretty lightweight. The rubber all around the edges provides that much needed shock absorption for this type of travel companion.

It also comes in two vibrant colours, blue and yellow – well it’s mostly grey with highlights of blue and yellow.

Another great design feature is that the cable and USB are integrated and actually fixed to the hard drive, so there’s no hassle involved in finding that adapter or even losing the one provided.

My Passport Go is also drop resistant up to 2m and is both PC and Mac ready.

Capacity

There are two sizes that you can choose from: 500GB or 1T which are good sizes for that extra bit of storage you need to lug around.

Performance

According to WD the My Passport Go is 2.5 times faster than most hard drives and I did think moving documents went really fast.

We need to remember though that Solid State Drives are at more of an advantage because they don’t have any moving or spinning parts to them – this makes them more robust. So that combined with the robust plastic casing on the Go and the rubber surrounds – there is no doubt that the My Passport Go will survive a lot.

The plus

Another advantage to SSDs is that they start up faster. You don’t have to wait for the platter to start spinning on the drive which then in turn makes them quieter, while also moving data back and forth much faster.

The minus

The price for 500GB is around R1500 and 1T around R3000, which is quite a pretty penny for so little space but if you think about it, you are trading ruggedness for capacity and if that’s what you’re looking for then perhaps the price will suit your pocket.

All in all it’s a great product, as long as you can afford it.

Also read Adata – life proof