It’s USB powered with USB 3.0 and 2.0 compatibility and it’s made my WD who have a great reputation for reliability (and the 2 year warranty doesn’t hurt). It’s small, it’s light and it looks great. The software they give with it lets you backup files automatically and it even offers password and encryption protection. It works for both Macs and PCs. What more could you really want?

Considering I’m meant to be reviewing the product it should annoy me that I can’t find something to fault with the drive. But I’ve actually been using one of these myself for too long now and even now it’s the main backup for all my important stuff.

The one thing it’s missing, perhaps, is that it only goes as high as 1TB. But really that’s a whole lot of room and unless you’re trying to download the internet so you can browse offline who’s really going to go through that? And besides, at this price you could buy yourself two of them and it’d still be cheaper than buying a 2TB with less features from somewhere else.

We’ve looked at a lot of external hard drives and we’re looking forward to reviewing others in the future. But at the moment the WD My Passport Essential is better value and better features than any other external hard drive currently on the market. There’s other options if you want something which looks a bit more stylish for example – but for functionality this is by far the best external hard drive for Mac we’ve seen.

Check the Price of This External Hard Drive for Mac

Amazon not only has a huge stock of external hard drives but also great prices making them our #1 choice. Click the button below to check the price of this hard drive on Amazon.