Review on Black WD 5TB My Passport Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 and 2.0 Compatible (WDBPKJ0050BBK-WESN) by Dave Rasic

1. Having a password that has nothing to do with encryption is an advantage. - You can set a password, change a password, remove a password or set a password for a specific Windows user who does not need to use a password without having to overwrite all data. Data is ALWAYS encrypted with a key unique to that drive. The options are whether to set a password for access. - The user who does not need to enter a password can be you or a user like Backup who does not have access to the network and makes backups every night. Malicious programs such as ransomware cannot access your drive using a normal user account without a password. - You can send a disc with confidential data without fear of being intercepted and with a GUID-level password, which is impractical for brute force. The password can be transmitted securely via signal. At the destination, they could use the drive as-is, or remove or change the password and set it up for their system. The same procedure is used when replacing a hard drive to work with a new computer.2. Imagine the situation where you are traveling with your Windows 10 laptop with encrypted hard drive and TPM. If you have an unencrypted backup drive, you are still vulnerable.3. Data recovery may not be as easy or possible when the hard drive has failed. It can also be said that irreplaceable data is usually stored in more than one place. People don't hire data recovery services unless the data is critical or they have another copy somewhere else. In this case, the encrypted disk is cheaper or safer to dispose of.4. Although I generally prefer Seagate drives because they do not come with non-standard services that can sometimes be incompatible and because they are typically faster, WD Passport drives are faster than Seagate drives in this drive class. Additionally, they no longer install the firmware that made them incompatible, and their track record of reliability rivals that of Seagate drives. When copying to a new drive, I get a consistent average of 110MB/s using the same connection hardware. For a full-size 3 1/2" 7200 it's not that fast, but for a 2 1/2" it is. It can have a higher air density, but due to the smaller diameter it goes under the head less per revolution and runs at 5400 rpm. Also note that a 5TB drive of this size requires dual-layer technology that requires a second pass to process the most important data. Where they usually do really badly is in random writes, where they have to first move the top layer to somewhere else, then write the bottom layer, and then overwrite the top layer, and then usually overwrite the top layer with new data. But even in this mode, WD drives are faster than Seagate drives. Thus, there is no quantitative penalty for hardware encryption. For these reasons, I bought the 5TB version of this drive, and you might want the same.