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External hard drives

Western Digital My Passport 5 TB, the largest portable here, on a name instead of a generation vs Seagate 4 TB portable drive, with two of five bullets about where to buy it

A terabyte more, or a page that says which USB generation you are getting?

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These two are the volume end of the portable shelf and both pages are thin. The WD My Passport 5 TB is the largest portable capacity in this batch and names its interface only as SuperSpeed USB — a marketing name, not a numbered generation. The Seagate 4 TB prints USB 3.0 twice and adds backwards compatibility with 2.0, then spends two of its five bullets on where the drive may be bought.

WD My Passport 5 TB portable external hard drive in black

Western Digital My Passport 5 TB, the largest portable here, on a name instead of a generation

Wins 3 of 10

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≈ $285 / £166 / 167 €

Seagate 4 TB portable external hard drive with a USB 3.0 connection

Seagate 4 TB portable drive, with two of five bullets about where to buy it

Wins 1 of 10

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≈ $190 / £120 / 139 €

Line by line

Compared on My Passport 5 TB, the largest portable here, on a name instead of a generation 4 TB portable drive, with two of five bullets about where to buy it
Capacity 5 TB, in the maker’s unit — the largest portable capacity here 4 TB, in the maker’s unit, no conversion applied
Portable or desktop format Portable — mobile storage with a slim design Portable — a light, compact way of expanding a computer’s capacity
USB generation Not published as a generation — SuperSpeed USB is a marketing name, and no 3.0, 3.1 or 3.2 appears anywhere USB 3.0, named twice, with backwards compatibility to USB 2.0
Stated link rate Not published — no figure in gigabits per second follows the interface name Not published — file transfer is called fast and no figure follows
Connector type Not published — cables are counted in the plural and the plug at neither end of any of them is named Not published — neither the socket on the drive nor the plug at the computer end is named
Power source Not published — no mains adapter, and nothing about drawing power from the port Not published — plug-and-play is promised and nothing about supply is said
Stated dimensions Not published — the design is called slim and no measurement follows Not published — the drive is called compact and no measurement is printed
Weight Not published, and no claim about weight is made either Not published — the drive is called light with no figure in grams
Cable supplied Yes, in the plural; how many and what they end in is not stated Not published — no lead is counted and no box contents are given
Warranty length Not published Not published

A tick means one listing published something the other did not, or published a better figure. It does not mean the product is better, and the column is not a score out of anything: a maker who says less loses lines here without losing a comparison. The two verdicts below are where the page is settled.

Which one, for whom

Buy the Western Digital My Passport 5 TB, the largest portable here, on a name instead of a generation

The My Passport is the drive to buy for capacity: 5 TB is the most portable storage in this batch, and it comes with cables in the box rather than a promise of compatibility. What its page will not tell you is which USB generation the socket belongs to — SuperSpeed USB has covered several — so the transfer rate you get is unknown before it arrives. Password protection and scheduled copies are named, which is more than the Seagate page offers.

Buy the Seagate 4 TB portable drive, with two of five bullets about where to buy it

The Seagate is a terabyte smaller and its interface is stated: USB 3.0, twice, with 2.0 compatibility. That is the one row where it is the clearer document. Everything else is missing, including any mention of a cable, and two of its five bullets are about where the drive may be purchased rather than what it is. On a page with five bullets, spending two that way is a choice about what a buyer is told.

The questions that come up before an order

Is “SuperSpeed USB” the same as USB 3.0?

It has been used for several generations, which is exactly the problem. A page that prints SuperSpeed USB and no number has not said which one, and the rates differ between them. This comparison records the WD generation as not published for that reason, and the Seagate as published because it prints 3.0 in figures.

Neither page states a warranty. Is that unusual?

On this shelf, no. Of the external drives here, most publish no term at all — the LaCie Rugged is one of the few that does, at three years. A missing term is a fact about the listing, not a statement that no cover exists, and this site does not fill it in from elsewhere.

The full reviews

Every price named in a summary was read on the date that review carries. What a shop asks today is shown beside the product, and it moves.