The WD Passport SSD is arguably the best in the WD's popular My Passport family of portable drives. The drive is fast, rugged, versatile and features strong encryption as an option. The fact that it works with both Windows and MacOS right out of the box doesn't hurt, either.

At the current street price of $100, $180 and $360 for 256GB, 512GB and 1TB, respectively, the My Passport SSD has enough to give the Samsung SSD T3 or the Glyph Atom a good run for their money (those prices respectively convert to £80, £140 and £280 for the UK and AU$130, AU$240 and AU$480 for Australia). It's an excellent storage device for anyone who needs something super compact yet very fast.

Compact and rugged design, strong encryption

Housing a solid-state drive (SSD) on the inside, the new My Passport SSD bucks the trend of WD's My Passport drives. Up to now, all previous drives in WD's My Passport family are based on regular hard drives.

Using solid-state storage allows the new My Passport to be WD's most compact portable drive yet. Measuring just 3.5 by 1.8 by 0.39 inches (90 by 45 by 10 millimeters), the new drive looks like a big domino piece. It's also so light, possibly lighter than the included USB-C cable.

The My Passport SSD is rugged, and slated to survive 6.5-foot drops with a shock resistance of up to 1,500 g-force. I tried dropping it many times on a carpet floor from that height and it worked just fine afterwards. The drive also include 256-bit AES hardware encryption -- the strongest commercial encryption to date -- that you can optionally turned on using WD Security software (available for both Windows and MacOS). Once this feature is turned on, nobody who doesn't know the password can access the data it contains.