Western Digital unveils its first portable SSD

Western Digital only just started accepting that SSDs are ready for the mainstream, but it's making up for that lost time by launching its first portable SSD just months after unveiling a desktop drive. The simply-named My Passport SSD gives you 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of flash storage in a pocketable and ever-so-slightly fashionable design. While it's not the absolute fastest drive we've seen with a peak 515MB/s sequential read speed (it's a bit faster than Samsung's T3), the new drive is definitely keeping up with the Joneses. It's designed for USB-C (there's a USB-A adapter in the box), touts 256-bit hardware encryption and is tough enough to survive a 6.5ft drop.

If you're expecting a pricing revolution, you'll have to look elsewhere. The My Passport SSD starts at a fairly commonplace $100 for the 256GB model, and you're looking at a respective $200 and $400 for its 512GB and 1TB siblings. Really, Western Digital is selling based on its familiar brand name as much as anything else. Not that this is necessarily a problem -- WD's ubiquity means that it should be relatively easy to find the My Passport where you might have to hunt around for some of its lesser-known rivals.