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Hi. I’m looking for a 5TB or 6TB 2.5" drive. The only one I can find for sale anywhere is the Seagate ST5000LM000. But I see a 5-TB MyPassport WDBPKJ0050BBK for sale for significantly less than the price of the Seagate drive (the bare drive).
My questions:
Can I buy a 5TB bare 2.5" drive from WD? What drive is used in the MyPassport?
Is it possible to remove the drive from the MyPassport and reformat and use it as a bare drive? I don’t care about the warranty. What I need to know is if the connectors are standard SATA.
Thanks! In fact the drive will be connected to a Wandboard (running Arch Linux), which has USB and SATA ports. Currently a 3.5" HDD is attached to the SATA port to serve as as storage. What I want to do is replace it with a 2.5" drive to save power.
As you may have gathered, I want to avoid the proprietary stuff on the Passport and just reformat the drive. Can I do that if I just connect the Passport to the USB port as intended? The silver connector in the picture doesn’t look at all familiar…
You can reformat the the Passport without any issues … but you won’t be able to delete the VCD Partition (which is used by the “proprietary stuff” WD Smartware).
I believe you can ‘hide’ this partition … but you can’t actually ‘delete’ it.
WD Elements Portables i believe do not have a VCD Partition as these drives feature No Encryption or Password Support.
I have a few WD Elements Portables (2TB, 4TB) and they don’t contain this VCD partition and i’m able to format/parition the drive to the fullest capacity it allows.
Hi. I’m about to commit to buying Seagate but the Elements drives look interesting. However, I can’t seem to find out whether the 5 Tb Elements uses a 2.5" drive or not. None of the specs on the WD sites says so, though given the size I assume it’s a 3.5" drive. Can you help?
P.S. If you’re planning to use a 5TB 2.5" hard drive as a “Boot Drive” you better make sure your Laptop/Desktop PC supports UEFI otherwise using the old BIOS standard, you’ll only be able to use 2TB of the 5TB drive.
Thanks. No, it’s just a storage drive, replacing a NAS that ran four 3.5" drives plus cooling with one 2.5" running off the USB port.
I went with the Seagate because I couldn’t find a reputable dealer for the WD Elements Portable here in France (I don’t consider Amazon reputable) that had it available, including the French WD Shop. If I decide to buy a second drive I’ll go with the WD.
Thanks for your help!
Les
The WD My Passport 5TB likely uses a WD Blue 2.5" drive, but Western Digital does not sell this capacity as a bare internal drive. Unlike Seagate’s ST5000LM000, which is a standard SATA drive, most modern WD external drives—including My Passport—use proprietary USB-to-PCB integration, meaning the drive inside does not have a standard SATA connector. This makes it impossible to remove and use as an internal drive without specialized modifications.
If you specifically need a bare 2.5” 5TB or 6TB SATA drive, your best option is the Seagate ST5000LM000, as WD does not offer a comparable alternative in the open market
while the MyPassport likely contains a 5TB WD drive, many models have USB-to-SATA bridges soldered making direct SATA use impossible. You might get lucky, but no guarantees!
