Is it possible to replace internal drive of a WD My Passport?

Question

I need to buy a new HDD drive with more capacity for my laptop and want to keep my current HDD as backup. Is it a good idea to buy an external My Passport model, open it and replace its internal HDD with the one in my laptop? I know that I will void the guarantee.

Does a Blue internal HDD have more performance than the HDD inside My Passport? Can I put another HDD with ANOTHER BRAND in a WD My Passport shell?

Solution

WD My Passports typically have the USB interface built into the drive itself.

You can't use the drive as a sata drive, nor can you yank out the drive and use the enclosure with another drive.

Quite simply, what you want won't work.

Comments

[Tetsujin]

Why don't you just buy a drive dock instead - much cheaper & doesn't require you to throw out a perfectly good drive... as it doesn't come with one.

[Rostamiani]

The price of external and internal drives are the same. This way I will not pay for a dock and will get a high quality WD dock for free!

[Kamil Maciorowski]

+1. From WD Support answer: "Depending on model, the internal hard drive in an external enclosure could be either SATA or native USB. We can only guarantee drive capacity. We cannot guarantee a particular internal hard drive model, data interface, rotational speed, or cache size in the external hard drive enclosure."

[Thalys]

The 3.5 inch ones are often internal drives in an enclosure. I've owned, and have opened more than one 2.5 inch/laptop style My Passport and most of them have integrated interfaces. I'd note that support page is massively generic.