WD 256GB My Passport SSD External Portable Drive, USB 3.1, Up to 540 MB/s - WDBKVX2560PSL-WESN

I bought two of these WD 2TB SSD external drives in 2019. I use them for music archiving and playback on my internet radio show. I take good care of them, store them in a cool place, never have dropped them and dont expose them to temperature extremes or crazy high humidity. I can say with confidence that with reasonable care these will give you great, reliable.service for years. On another note I also own an older WD desktop external drive that I bought in 2015...it continues to work well and without issues. As an archivist I always say that if youre going to put all your valuable stuff on external drives, buy two and keep them identical. Never put all your eggs in one basket!

I bought three of these to use as convenient backup drives, and theyve served me very well so far. Fast transfer speeds and not a single problem so far -- Ive had them about a year.

Got the drive, and waited a day and a half before using due to recent subzero temps. I would always recommend allowing any new devise to come to local temperature before using. I intended for this drive to be dedicated to one heavy data access app. However, when I moved the data for the app to this drive, a 76GByte folder consumed 152 GBytes of a 256GByte drive. It was formatted exFAT with 1024KByte clusters. So a lot of partly filled clusters were being used. Reformatted NTFS, with default 4096 byte clusters and all is well.

No complaints here. Been working great so far. I use it all the time to run certain software files off of, since my laptop HD isnt the largest. Heats up a tad after several hours, but thats about it.

This is a wonderful purchase-the password protection is invaluable! I had bought Seagate in the past because they were recommended. I have had Seagates crash on me, but so far, never a Western Digital.

Wow. I was told both by a specialist who upgrades computers and knowledgable friend that using an SDD external drive would not speed up my computer. Wrong. I moved my entire operating system and cloned my internal drive to this thing and it is lightning fast. Apps that used to bounce on my iMac for 15-30 seconds now open almost as fast as they are clicked. Just look up the specs on your computer and make sure you have at least USB 3.0 (thats what I have). Otherwise youll get external bottleneck from the USB connection and it wont make a difference. To reiterate- this thing can make your computer outrageously fast. My internal drive has officially been relegated to the dust bin. I may use it for extra storage in the future.

Works fine - fast - USB cord is very short - like 3 or so inches long

I purchased three of these drives and one came with a bad cable. Three hours with customer service led to: 1. WD: The serial number is invalid. Please send us a photo of the drive and proof of purchase. 2. WD: After two hours, oops wrong database, we found it but we cant send you the cable because its not under warranty. 3. Me: Its bad out of the box. 4. WD: Oh. Well we still cant send it because we dont sell the cable as a separate accessory. 5. Me: Send the damn cable 6. WD: Well discuss this with our RMA team and see what we can do. 7. Me: Supervisor please 8. WD: I understand your problem well get you your cable in less than two weeks. 9. Me: Aaaarrgh (This was all done in a three way conference call with an Amazon representative and WD still couldnt find a way to do the right thing.)

Drive itself is fast and the transfer speeds are also great. Attached Crystal Disk Mark benchmark as well as the transfer speed of a 102GB file taking only 5 minutes using USB 3.1 (internal storage is SATA so limited by that). Expensive drive but will be very useful. Happy with everything so far.

Got this as an addon drive for my MacBook Pro, I used some Velcro to stick it to the top of the lid and its working great. Im impressed with the speed, real world numbers Im seeing are around 500MB / sec read and 475 MB/s writes, which means moving 10 GB in a little over 20 seconds! As an old timer in computers Im blown away at that, even though I know the newer drives are even much faster. For ebooks, music and movie storage its plenty fast and the same speed as the internal SSD in my last MacBook. My only big complaint is the cable that comes with it, its very stiff and when I attached it to the drive I think it damaged one of my USB ports, even though I pre-bent it into shape. Ive ordered a thinner, more flexible cable with right angle connectors I hope will do a better job.