Five terabytes in a case you can hold in one hand sounds like the answer to every backup problem. Western Digital’s launch announcement in September 2019 called this its slimmest 5TB portable drive, at 0.75 inches thick, and the price per terabyte is still the main reason people buy it. I think it is a good second copy of your data. I would never let it be the only copy, and the owner reports below explain why.
Product image from the Amazon listing.
The exact model here is the black 5TB My Passport, part number WDBPKJ0050BBK-WESN. It is a spinning hard drive in a plastic shell, connected by USB 3.0 or later at 5 Gbps. WD also sells a separate My Passport for Mac, and I will point out where a report comes from that model instead.
On a Mac, Your First Job Is the Format
Australian consumer group CHOICE lists this model with NTFS as the default format, and PCWorld’s review of the 5TB drive found the same. That is a Windows format. A Mac will read it but can’t write to it without help. In a WD Community thread, a new owner could not copy files from a Mac to a My Passport, and another user gave the short answer: “You can only read NTFS drives by default with macOS.”
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So you have a choice to make on day one, before any files go on the drive. Open Disk Utility to see how yours arrived, since units may differ. Reformatting erases what is there, which costs you nothing when it is new.
If the drive will only ever touch Macs, format it as APFS in Disk Utility. That is the option I would pick for Time Machine.
If it must move between Mac and Windows, exFAT is the usual answer, and it needs no extra software on either side. There is a catch. exFAT has no journal, so a sudden unplug or power cut can do more harm to it. One Best Buy buyer raised this point, and it matches why I would eject carefully. A 2020 thread shows how an exFAT problem can look: a 5TB My Passport that worked on Windows but refused to mount on two Macs, with First Aid finding nothing. The thread shows no confirmed fix.
If you want to keep NTFS, a third-party driver will give your Mac write access. That is one more piece of software to keep working through macOS updates, and I would avoid it for a backup drive.
The cable matters too. CHOICE lists a USB-A connection and a USB-A cable only, with no USB-C cable in the box. Most recent Macs will need an adapter or a hub, so add that to the cost.
Fine for Big Files, Slow for Small Ones
PCWorld tested this 5TB drive in October 2019. It called the drive average in a 48GB copy test and slow in its small-file write test. It also found NTFS noticeably faster than exFAT for writing small files, although both handled large files well. Its advice was blunt and fair: this drive is strong on capacity, price and style, and if speed matters, buy an SSD. The same review estimated the price per gigabyte at about one-fifth that of SSDs at the time.
That split matches what a hard drive is. Long video files go on smoothly. A photo library or a folder of code with thousands of small files takes much longer than the size suggests. Time Machine works with many small files, so expect it to feel slow.
You will also see people say that high-capacity portable drives use shingled recording, a method that packs more data onto the platter but can slow down heavy rewrites. WD’s documents that I read do not state this for the model. I would treat it as one more reason to be patient on big jobs, and to avoid using this as a working drive for active editing.
Plan your first backup with a little arithmetic. If you assume 100 MB/s, which is my own round number for a portable hard drive and not a measurement of this one, then 5TB takes about 14 hours to fill. A 1TB first backup would be close to 3 hours, and many small files will stretch that. Start it before bed, and tell your Mac not to sleep.
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Product image from the Amazon listing.
The Time Machine Reports
The most worrying Mac reports come from the sibling model. In a 2021 WD Community thread, the owner of a 5TB My Passport for Mac on an iMac said Time Machine kept stopping until the drive was unmounted and the computer rebooted. A replacement drive did the same thing. Disk Utility’s First Aid ran, and the disk came back, but the error returned the next morning. A MacBook Pro owner with a 5TB EasyStore joined in with the same pattern. WD staff suggested a diagnostic, the drives passed, and the owner wrote, “There does not appear to be any solution to this problem.”
Two owners and a handful of posts don’t make a rule. Those were different product names, on an older macOS. But when backups fail in silence, you lose the one thing you bought the drive for. So after setup, check that a recent backup really exists. Open Time Machine, look at the date of the last backup, and restore one small file now and then. A backup you have never restored is only a hope.
When It Stops Talking
Here is the failure that scares me more. One owner of this model family, a WDBPKJ0050BBK-0A, described a drive that still spun up but no longer appeared on three Windows PCs. It showed only as an unknown USB device with a Code 43 error. New cables, other ports and WD’s own utilities did not help. A forum member blamed firmware corruption, a failed USB bridge or a controller fault, and the owner expected to end up at a professional data recovery service.
That matters because of how this drive is built. WD’s announcement says the drive has 256-bit AES hardware encryption. Rossmann Group, a data recovery shop, says My Passport drives encrypt every sector whether or not the user ever sets a password. It sells this service, so read the claim with that in mind. It also says recovery is still possible when the USB board dies, but that a password set with WD Security is the true dead end. It lists encryption recovery work at hundreds of dollars.
In practice, you can’t just pull the disk out, put it in a cheap case and expect to read it. If the board fails and the data has no other copy, you may be paying a specialist.
So think hard before you turn on the password. WD Security does protect a lost drive, which is a real benefit for something this portable. But if you forget the password, or the hardware dies, the protection works against you. Only use it if you keep another copy somewhere else, and store the password in a real password manager. Also check that the software supports your version of macOS before you depend on it, because I found no clear statement about that for Apple silicon Macs.
Product image from the Amazon listing.
Handling a Spinning Disk You Carry
A portable hard drive has moving parts. It does not like being knocked while it is running, so let it finish and eject it before you put it in a bag. PCWorld puts the 5TB model at 0.46 pounds, against 0.27 pounds for the 1TB and 2TB versions, so don’t expect the same pocket feel as a small drive.
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The warranty is three years. That covers the hardware, not your data. The one owner’s story above shows the difference.
A Cheap Second Copy, Never the Only One
I would buy this for one job: a low-cost local backup of files that also live somewhere else. A Mac user can format it as APFS, point Time Machine at it, keep it at home and check it once a month. A Windows user can plug it in and start. A video hobbyist can store finished projects on it, as long as the originals are safe on another drive.
Skip it if you want to edit from it, if you hate adapters, or if you plan to throw it into a backpack every day. A portable SSD costs far more per terabyte and survives that life better. Skip it also if this would be the only home for your family photos. Any single drive can fail, and this one may be harder than most to recover.
If you want a lot of space for little money and you will keep a second copy, the WD My Passport 5TB does that job well. This is an affiliate link. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
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