Western Digital (WD) 5TB My Passport Black Portable Hard Drive (Review)

One of our favorite portable hard drive (HDD) solutions for multiple years in a row now (they just keep delivering every time) has been Western Digital’s (WD) My Passport Black series. Continuing this tradition, their 5TB model shines well within the footsteps of the models before it, and it’s even on sale ($99) right now (while it lasts)–links below.

These drives have been absolutely perfect for travel, as well as gaming console storage expansion for both the PlayStation and the Xbox series. Providing a ton of capacity for your favorite games at a great price. Especially now that they have reached 5TB in capacity.

They aren’t as fast of SSD options being that they are your typing spinning solution, but they provide a lot more space at the fraction of the cost. So it’s always a balance between capacity vs speed. If capacity is more important, these are your best bet.

So far, we have seen transfer speeds of up to 125-135MB/s (read and write) on average with the 5TB model, making it great for getting your content on and off quickly. Far greater than a thumb drive (of course), and with 5TB of capacity, you can store around 40-50 of the most graphic-intense games available on the latest gaming consoles (some of these games have been reaching more than 100GB in size).

The build of these drives has always proven to be quite durable while maintaining a sleek profile that allows you to easily slid them in and out of a pocket while on the go. Of course, we’d always recommend storing them in a place a little safer than your pocket, but the ability is there nonetheless.

What makes this even better, you can find the drive on sale right now for only $99 (from $150 current MSRP), making it the best price we have seen for this model yet. We have made two links available below to where you can find it at this price. Normally, these drives fall within a pretty reasonable price range by default, which is one of the major driving factors for us outside of speed and longevity. Therefore a sale like this is a huge layer of icing on that cake.

*Note: mentions of this sale are/were accurate during the time that this story published. 

They have maintained their position at the top of our favorites for portable drives since their 2TB Black model first hit the market. Maintaining one of the longest living spots on any of our favorite lists thus far. I think that really says a lot.

*Average price is based on the time this article was published

Specifications:

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