WD My Passport Slim Best for Travelling

WD My Passport Slim Best for Travelling

Before the days of travelling, I was a heavy user of hard drives for years. Throughout the years, I have used brands like Quantum, Micropolis, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba, Buffalo, Seagate and IBM.  Thus, I was a RAID user with SCSI hard drives and it cost thousands each back in the 90s.

I still remember the excitement when Quantum released the “Bigfoot” with 1.2GB space. We joked about the reliability of the space of hard drive due to its “large capacity”. Now, a common hard drive is 500GB in space which is almost 500x more space than “Bigfoot” and the physical size of the hard drive becomes smaller too.

I started travel blogging a few years ago and I have been using external hard drives for some time due to its size and reliability. Thus, WD has been my preferred brand name for external hard drive as I have been using them for years.

I acquired WD MY Passport Slim a few months ago and I have been using it at home, in office and also use while I travelled around. I might do a quick review a few months ago but it would not be accurate so I decided to put up an honest review now.

I have travelled with my WD MY Passport Slim to Australia and Thailand so far. I travelled around Sydney for nine days and road tripping in Southern Thailand for twelve days.

(Road tripping in Thailand for 12 days non-stop)
With these two trips, I needed a small and versatile hard drive (and laptop) as I was travelling on my own. Hence, I was carrying two cameras, one laptop, one battery pack, cables and charges most of the time when I travelled around. At the end of the day, I will back up my pictures onto my laptop and WD MY Passport Slim. The best way to safeguard the pictures is always to do a double backup. In the past, I had bad experiences with bad SD card or other unwarranted incidents.

Why WD MY Passport Slim?

Size. Size does matter but for an external hard drive, smaller is better. When I travel, I usually rely on my backpack and I don’t intend to over burden it and my back too.

(Size comparison with WD MY Passport)
Disk space. A hard drive should be at least 1TB and above. Thus, pictures and video files are huge and one trip could take up to 30-50GB space at least. Having an external hard drive with a substantial disk space makes sense.

USB 3.0. You will love the speed of the transfer rate of USB 3.0. It cuts the transferring file speed to more than 50% comparing to USB 2.0. I need the transfer files quick and with USB 3.0, you can edit pictures and videos without copying the files onto the laptop.

Versatility. Even though there is no label indicates about its versatility but I spotted dents on my WD MY Passport Slim. Knocks and drops are part and parcel of travelling and the hard drive is still working fine despite some knocks here and there.

Warranty. Everything is under warranty now including cars. Even though, I never had issues with WD hard drives but the warranty is just the insurance for unwarranted incidents.

Price. You will be surprised to know that WD MY Passport Slim is very cost effective. The money you pay WD MY Passport Slim is probably more the less the same with other external hard drives.

WD MY Passport Slim is one of my reliable travelling gadgets I am using now I will be travelling with WD MY Passport Slim again soon next month with another 10 days road trip and there are plenty more future trips currently in discussion.. Lastly, I will recommend more useful gadgets for travelling in the future.

Wilson Ng