WD My Passport X Review – Maxi-Geek 60 Second Review

It is a strange thing to attempt to put a review together for a hard drive, but that is my task, which thankfully is made easier with the My Passport X, as it's quite an amazing piece of kit.

The hard drive is powered by USB and designed for gaming, what that means from the makers I can’t say, but I can tell you it works for gaming really well. The drive, with its casing can be used on PC, or formatted and used on an Xbox One, which is where I tested it on and over the course of the period I used it found no real issues.

In order to test just how fast the response times were, I booted up Sunset Overdrive on the internal drive contained within the Xbox One, the game loaded ok, no lag or slowdown, as it did when I played it originally. I then moved it to my existing external drive, a Toshiba and it performed as well there, with a few moments of lag from now and then, the final test was moving it onto the My Passport X and there it performed as well as the internal drive. I did not notice any lag on the game, or slow loading textures, I did not test with stop watches and such, but the load times seemed around the same as the internal drive.

I then went about installing Call of Duty Advanced Warfare onto it, a game that needs fast performance when you are playing online and the only game I could think that might have issues playing from an external drive. It turns out I was wrong, it loaded up faster on this drive than it did the internal when I tested it there, it was only a few seconds at most, but when you watching that load bar and it hits the end faster, I was happy.

I also went about moving games around, just to see how long it would take, there were some games that did not reach 1 gigabyte and others than broke 30, in each case the time for moving onto and off the drive seemed around the same, which is a good thing for the drives read and write speeds. Perhaps the best selling point is that it does not require an additional power point to work, which means you won’t have to rearrange your setup to accommodate it. The only issue I had with the drive was that the light on it is really bright, so when playing without lights on, it caused a lot of light and shadow to show from behind the tv.

The My Passport X is a great little drive, it has great performance across a variety of games and a price to match. The lack of an external power source is a great win, but that super bright led on it might annoy some, but the end result is a great drive to help you game longer.