It’s ideal for people who’ve outgrown the storage built into their MacBook or other laptop because it’s much faster than cloud storage. But so do traditional external hard drives like the WD My Passport SSD. ICloud, OneDrive, Google Drive… they all have their place. Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac WD My Passport SSD final thoughts
Pick your adjective - they all describe the My Passport SSD. Rename the drive, reset its file system to FAT32 or exFAT. Open Windows File Explorer, locate and right-click on WD My Passport that you need to format, select 'Format'. Wd My Passport For Mac Format For Windows. This means the My Passport SSD can’t be used with an iPad or iPhone if it’s been locked, as there’s no iOS/iPadOS version of the unlocking app. If it is larger than 32GB, you can only format it to exFAT. It’s required to lock and unlock it, too. The drive offers optional 256-bit AES hardware encryption, but a Mac or Windows utility is necessary to password protect the contents of the SSD. That’s not ideal for a mobile drive like the My Passport SSD. This offers backups, but the utility is designed around scheduling these on a regular basis, which assumes the drive will be constantly attached to your computer. Western Digital pre-loads onto the drive its WD Discovery software for macOS and Windows.
