You guys/girls ever see something that you really don’t need but just have to have in your life? For the most part, I try to keep things like this under control, but a while back during our anniversary contest I happened to see that WD had this bright orange external drive. Now I wish they had a bright orange My Passport SSD like the one I reviewed last year, this isn’t it. This is the larger spinning disk-based model. But its bright bright orange! So I had to check it out. So today I’m going to show you guys the drive, check out its performance, then talk a little about if classic external storage is still a good option these days.

Product Name: WD My Passport 1TB

Review Sample Provided by: WD

Written by: Wes Compton

Pictures by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

specs

 


Packaging

Well, the packaging is as bright or brighter than the orange drive is. The front of the box is split between yellow and white with a picture of the orange drive in the middle. Then up top, you have the WD logo as well as the model name. In the bottom right corner, they have used a sticker that can be swapped out depending on the capacity used, in this case, it’s the smaller 1TB design. The back of the box has the same yellow and white split going on. There isn’t too much going on back here, basically just a mention of backing up and security up top then contents and compatibility lists down in the bottom half.

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Inside the box was yet another box. THEN inside of there were two formed cardboard trays that wrapped around the drive for protection. You basically get the drive, that is also wrapped in plastic, the USB cable, and a little bit of documentation. One paper lets you know where to go for support and the other has some tech specs and the warranty information.

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Photos and Features

Okay, so there aren’t a ton of things to talk about when it comes to portable hard drives so this might be a little short but let's take a look at the WD My Passport. Now the most obvious thing is the bright orange color and I know not everyone gets as excited about orange, remember there are 7 other colors including multiple muted colors like black and black with grey. For me though, the bright color is important, because this is the type of device that I sort of loose in the madness that is my office sometimes. I’m not saying my office is a mess, but sometimes things blend in and being able to spot the My Passport is helpful to grab it to transfer files or in my case to back up things for a trip or LAN.

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So looking past the color, the drive has a very similar design to the My Passport SSD that I took a look at last year. No surprise there, this was out before that drive. What that means though is the wave or grooved design in the bottom half, a split down the middle and then the smooth part up top. Then the WD logo is embossed into the front as well.

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Around back you have the same design only this side isn’t as clean. For one all around the edge, you can see that this is where the casing comes apart. Then, of course, they have to put all of the required certifications logos. WD did try to keep things a little cleaner though because all of those logos are in another shade of orange. Then below all of that is a sticker with the model information, the place of manufacture, and the serial number. Lastly, they also slipped tiny orange feet on to the corners, so if you lay the drive down flat it shouldn’t slide around.

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Down along the bottom edge the grooves do continue slightly. This is also where the USB cable plugs in. While this is a spinning drive WD did still go with USB 3.0 for the interface as you can see from the micro-USB3 connection here. A not so well known secret is devices with this plug can sometimes still plug in with a normal micro-USB connection on the part to the right in this photo. It will plug in, but I don’t know if it will work in this case. Anyhow also in this area, just to the right, is a small slit with a white LED indicator that lights up when you are plugged in and transferring data.

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So the included cord isn’t super long, you are going to need to keep the drive near your PC or laptop while it is plugged in. The cord is also bright orange to match the drive itself.

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As for the overall size of the My Passport, it is a lot larger than the SSD version. But compared to some of my older spinning drive externals it isn’t too bad. It is just past 4 and a ¼ or 110mm tall. Then 3.21in wide or 81.5mm. As for the thickness, it is 13.8mm or 0.54 in thick but apparently according to the specifications the larger capacity models (3 and 4 TB) are thicker at 21.5mm or 0.85 in so keep that in mind. This version weighs 170g where the larger drives are 250g as well.

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Performance

Okay before diving into the testing I did want to take a look at what drive is actually in the My Passport. To do that I ran Crystal Disk Info to get a look without pulling everything apart. What I found was the WD10JMVW-11AJGS4. A quick google search gets us photos of the drive as some people apparently like to pull these out and resell them. It is a 2.5 inch WD Blue hard drive. The CrystalDiskInfo gives us some more information about the drive like its rotation speed, at 5400 RPM this isn’t going to be as scorching fast drive but it should be enough to justify the need for the USB 3 connection.

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So my first test was CrystalDiskMark, here I wanted to see the overall read and write speeds as well as get a peek at how the drive handles queue depths. So the sequential tests show really good 121.9 MB/s for the reads and 122.3 MB/s for the write speeds. Of course, things really drop off once you get things queued up.

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ATTO shows similar results with transfer speeds being slow with small transfer sizes but anything later than 32KB was solid in the 120MB range on both read and writes.

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Anvil’s Storage Benchmark was more of the same as well, 115 MB/s on read and 115.38 on the writes with sequential tests but low file sizes really dropped off. At least write speeds were a little better in that situation.

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As for actual file transfers, with a large movie file, I was 118 MB/s consistently. But moving down in size to image files dropped things down to 79.8MB/s at leak with a lot more inconsistency. Then with word document files that are even smaller, the speeds were MUCH lower at 1.69 MB/s. Basically, the My Passport is capable of fast transfers, but those speeds are going to drop the lower the file size.

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Movie

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Images

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Word documents

 


Overall and Final Verdict

So how did the My Passport turn out? I haven’t reviewed an external drive with a spinning drive in it for 6 years and I had to go back to that point to get an idea of how things compare. Honestly, when it comes to performance things really haven’t changed. The sequential read and write performance of the My Passport were spot on with the ioSafe Portable. Without a 7200 RPM drive or an SSD, I think that’s about what you should expect. With it being a hard drive, it did really choke on the high queue depth stuff with low file sizes. Pictures were slower but still good, but if you had to use this to back up a TB of tiny word documents and other small files it might take a long time to get that done. That said my only other issue was with the cable length but that was a small issue. I understand the need for a short cable, I might also be frustrated if they gave you 10 feet of cord, but if you use this with a desktop hopefully you are like me and have a shelve right above it.

So what did I like about the My Passport? Well obviously I liked the orange color, but beyond that, I really dig all of the color options they have available. It's really a shame they don’t also have these options for the SSD version. I also really like the simple but stylish look that WD has been using, it only takes a little contrast in smooth and groovy to let you know right away that this is a WD device. One of the main benefits of the My Passport, especially over flash drives and some of the external SSD options is the capacity available. Even with this being the smallest option at 1TB you are hard pressed to find a flash drive or SSD that is comparable, obviously WD has the My Passport SSD and there are a few 1TB flash drives but they do get expensive at that size. Not to mention have you ever searched Amazon for a 1TB flash drive, it looks like almost everyone who sells a small 1 or 2 GB flash drive has mistakenly listed them as 1TB drives. So for most people who need to back up a lot of data, a drive like this is your only option. Especially when you get up into the 4TB capacity.

Then, of course, we have the price point. You just aren’t going to come close to $54.99 for a Terabyte of storage with a flash drive or SSD option for a while. The 1TB WD My Passport SSD that I love and use all of the time still runs you over $300. That said, if we dive into other external drives, there are a few options that are a few dollars cheaper (even from WD). A few even have a few color options, but none as many as what WD is offering. So if you need just a basic 1TB black external you could save a few bucks, but if you want something that looks good as well then WD has the My Passport.

fv5recommended

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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