Western Digital’s First Portable SSD

Advice that’s been making rounds in the tech community for a little while now is, move your OS to a solid state drive. Used properly, an SSD gives you boot times in single digit seconds and any programs you keep on it are going to start up faster than you can actually click on the icon. Now, Western Digital is bringing that speed to portable storage with a solid state version of their excellent My Passport series. The drive comes in 3 sizes—256GB, 512GB, and 1TB—to suit your needs. For us, it’s 1TB because it’s never a bad idea to have free space on your drive. Every storage size is built to reach transfer speeds of up to 515MB/s, so theoretically you could transfer a full TB in about 4 hours. For other drives, you could be looking at days. No matter what, this drive is going to be faster than the external storage you currently have, but we should mention that to take full advantage of the drive’s capabilities, you’ll need USB Type-C. It’s a rarer connection, but if this is where the future’s heading, expect it to become much more common.