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WD My Passport Ultra Performance Review | Droidcops

Western Digital brings excitement to the segment in portable HDDs with unique designs and vibrant colors. There are three keys that make this product more attractive, ranging from design, technology, and software.

Like the new WD My Book and WD My Cloud, the WD My Passport (and My Passport SSD) takes a new design form and gets a full color change with six options to choose from. My Passport Ultra takes this portable series one step further especially by setting a two-tone theme. This portable storage has a metallic finish underneath, a matte black or white plastic part.

Test WD My Passport Ultra

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To measure the performance of the WD My Passport Ultra drive against other models, the testers used Crystal Disk Mark under Windows 10 desktop (Xeon, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD) and BlackMagic Speed ​​Test under MacOS laptop (MacBook Pro late 2013, 2.4 GHz i5 , 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD). testers also timed simple large photo backups, as well as checked compatibility with Synology NAS units.

Starting with Crystal Disk Mark running on the tester’s Windows PC, the tester performed two different tests per drive, using 50MB and 1000MB file sizes to simulate relative speed when handling photo or video files, respectively.

In comparison, the test PC’s internal SSD scored 556.2 and 536.8 Megabytes per second for sequential read and write speeds when using a 50MB test file, and 553.4 and 536.9 Megabytes per second, again for sequential read and write speeds. , when using a test file size of 1GB . These are fairly fast numbers, but on par for the course for a fairly good solid state drive/SSD; The full score is in the screengrabs below.

Next on to portable drives, and before starting, a word of warning to anyone offering USB 2 and USB 3 ports: for maximum performance, make sure the portable drive is plugged into a USB 3 port. It will work on older USB 2 ports, but the speed will vary. very limited. To find out how many testers plugged a drive into a USB 2 port on a test PC and measured a sequential read-write speed of only 34 Megabytes per second – not great.

WD my Passport Ultra

With My Passport Ultra 2TB connected to a USB 3 port, Crystal Disk Mark measured read and write speeds of 252.8 and 117 Megabytes per second when using a test size of 50MB and 132.7 and 122.4 Megabytes per second when the test file size was increased to 1GB. . See screenshot below. This is a pretty good score for a 2.5-inch physical hard drive.

To put the above scores into perspective, the testers retested the tester’s older WD Elements 1TB drive, the model the testers relied on. This scored 88.48 and 83.14 Megabytes per second for sequential read and write speeds when using the 50MB test file, and 85.41 and 79.75 Megabytes per second, again for sequential read and write speeds, when using the test file size. 1GB. See screenshot below.

So the new 2TB My Passport Ultra scored about 50% higher in all of Crystal Mark’s tests, but managed to deliver very impressive read speeds at a file size of 50MB, about three times faster than the old Elements 1TB drive. So it’s a great result for a drive that’s not only four times as large in capacity, but also faster to be comfortable.

WD My Passport Ultra

Switching to the test Mac laptop, the tester ran the Disk Speed ​​Test Black Magic Design utility, a tool designed to evaluate drives for video editing, but is an all-around good performance indicator.

Starting with the older 1TB Elements drive, Disk Speed ​​Test reported write and read speeds of 78.1 and 77 Megabytes per second, compared to write and read speeds of 114.3 and 120.2 Megabytes per second for the 2TB My Passport Ultra. newer. testers used a stress test size of 1GB, and again the newer, larger drive is roughly 50% faster than the older one. See screenshot below.

WD My Passport Ultra Review

Finally, as a simple real-world test, the tester copied a large 2.99GB folder containing 177 JPEG and RAW files from the tester’s Mac laptop to the drive, then back again. It took 44 seconds to write a file from the Mac to the drive for an average speed of 65.86 Megabytes per second, then 28 seconds to read it from the portable drive and write it back to the laptop’s SSD, for an average speed of 106.75 Megabytes per second.

Oh and one more test! the tester also connected the My Passport Ultra drive to the Synology NAS which was also loaned to the tester and managed to trigger an automatic backup using the USB Copy app.

Conclusion WD My Passport Ultra

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Backing up your data, whether it’s photos, videos, music, or plain old documents, is extremely important, and a critical part of this process is transporting backups to different locations – after all, fires, floods, and thefts rarely require a single drive but leave backups alone. next to him unharmed. This is why portable drives are so useful.

They can store and transport large amounts of data quickly and easily – just a single USB cable will transfer data and power the drive, and when they’re done, they’re small enough to fit in a jacket or even a trouser pocket. Their portability also makes them great for providing more storage for laptop owners who have filled their internal drives, but aren’t ready for a system upgrade.

The table can be shifted left or right

personal testers have several portable drives. testers used it on the road to back up the contents of a memory card after a photo shoot the day before locking it in a safe. The tester used another at home to back up large amounts of data before moving it to a friend’s house to keep it separate from the original. testers sometimes use it while working on testers’ laptops in cafes to accommodate larger video projects that don’t fit into the tester’s internal drive.

Portable drives are very useful and easy to have several to manage your data and backups. The question then is which one? The testers can wholeheartedly recommend the WD portable drive has a number without any complaints. The testers’ preference was for capacity and value, so testers opted for those using traditional spinning drives, and the 2TB version performed well in testers’ tests.

While testers admired WD’s efforts to make the premium My Passport and Ultra series more visually appealing, testers equally enjoyed using the basic Elements drives as they were the same inside without the software. In the end, even though the prices are very close, they can often overlap, so see which is the best deal when you’re ready to buy – don’t wait too long if you’re not currently backing up your data.

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