WD’s My Passport and Samsung’s T5 get compared constantly because they sit at opposite ends of the “external drive” category while costing roughly the same amount of shelf space in a store. One is a spinning hard drive in a plastic shell. The other is a solid state drive in a metal shell. That difference matters more than the brand names on the front.
I’ve used both types for backup duty and field work. The short version: the T5 is faster, tougher, and quieter, but you pay close to double per terabyte. The My Passport is slower and more fragile but gets you cheap bulk storage, which is still a legitimate use case in 2024.
What’s actually different inside
The My Passport uses a 2.5″ mechanical hard drive, almost always a WD Blue or similar laptop-class drive, spinning at 5400RPM. It has a physical platter and read/write head. The T5 is NAND flash on a small PCB with a SATA-to-USB bridge controller. No moving parts.
That single fact explains almost every other difference between them: speed, durability, noise, heat, and price per gigabyte all trace back to mechanical vs. solid state.
Speed
The My Passport tops out around 120-140 MB/s sequential, which is normal for a 5400RPM 2.5″ drive behind USB 3.0. Random access (lots of small files) is where it really struggles, often dropping to single-digit MB/s because the head has to physically seek across the platter for each file.
The T5 sustains 450-540 MB/s sequential over USB 3.1 Gen 1, and random performance stays strong because flash doesn’t care where the data physically lives. Copying a folder with 10,000 small photos will feel night-and-day faster on the T5.
| Spec | WD My Passport (HDD) | Samsung T5 (SSD) |
|---|---|---|
| Storage type | 2.5″ mechanical HDD | NAND flash SSD |
| Sequential speed | ~120-140 MB/s | ~450-540 MB/s |
| Random file performance | Weak, seek-limited | Strong, consistent |
| Typical capacities | 1TB-5TB | 250GB-2TB |
| Price per TB | Low ($20-30/TB) | Higher ($60-100/TB) |
| Shock tolerance | Poor when powered/spinning | Good, no moving parts |
| Noise/heat | Audible seek clicks, mild heat | Silent, barely warm |
| Weight | ~140-180g | ~50g |
Durability and failure modes
This is where I’d push back on anyone treating these as interchangeable. A spinning hard drive has a head floating microns above a platter. Drop it while it’s actively reading or writing and you risk a head crash, which can scratch the platter and cause permanent data loss, not just a corrupted file. Even idle drops transmit shock through the enclosure to the drive mechanism. I’ve killed a My Passport this way, a 2-foot fall onto carpet while unplugged, and it still didn’t recover.
The T5 doesn’t have that failure mode. It can take drops, vibration, and travel abuse that would be a coin-flip for a mechanical drive. It’s not indestructible, flash cells wear out with write cycles and the controller can fail, but you’re not dealing with precision mechanical parts.
Hard drives also fail from simple old age, bearing wear, and heat cycling, especially if the drive sees daily use rather than occasional backups. SSDs degrade more gracefully, often slowing down or throwing errors before total failure rather than dying outright.
Price and capacity
This is the My Passport’s whole reason to exist. You can get 4TB or 5TB of HDD storage for what a 1TB SSD costs. If you’re archiving a video library, backing up a NAS, or just need a dumping ground for files you rarely touch, that price-per-terabyte gap is hard to ignore. For bulk cold storage, a cheap external hard drive is still the sensible choice, and nobody should feel talked into overpaying for flash they don’t need.
The T5 and similar portable SSDs make sense when you’re actively working off the drive, not just storing it. Video editors pulling footage directly from an external drive, photographers transferring RAW files on location, or anyone who needs the drive to survive being tossed in a bag daily are better served by a portable SSD.
Which one should you buy
Buy the HDD if you want cheap bulk backup, you’re backing up to it occasionally rather than working off it daily, and it’ll mostly sit still on a desk. Buy the SSD if you need speed, you’re traveling with it, you’re editing media directly from the drive, or you just don’t want to think about drop risk.
A middle path some people miss: use both. A HDD for the big cold archive, like your full photo library or old project backups, and a small external SSD enclosure paired with a bare NVMe drive for active work gives you better speed and lower cost than buying one large premium SSD to cover both jobs.
Whatever you pick, treat either one as a backup target, not the only copy. HDDs fail from drops and age, SSDs fail from controller faults and wear, and no external drive is immune to just getting lost. The 3-2-1 rule still applies regardless of which technology is sitting in the enclosure.
