Details
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Price: $165 inc VAT from www.amazo.com
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Manufacturer: www.wdc.com
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Ratings: 9/10
Western Digital’s My Passport has the
biggest capacity here, at 2TB, but it’s not exactly flashy. Its plastic
enclosure makes barely any concession to style and, at 230g in weight and 21mm
thick, it can’t compete with some of the slimmer and lighter models in offer in
this test.
It’s a sturdy bit of kit, though; while
it’s made from plastic, there’s not much give in its chassis. We’d be confident
of slinging this drive in a backpack and it coming out the other side with
nothing worse than a couple of scratches.
Western
Digital My Passport 2TB
The Western Digital isn’t able to compete
with some of the other drives here for flashy design or future-proofed
features, then, but it soon gathered a head of steam in our benchmarks.
It made a decent start in AS SSD’s
sequential read and write tests, with results of 108MB/s and 99MB/s only a
couple of megabytes behind the fastest hard-disk-based drives in this test, and
the Western Digital came into its own when tasked with CrystalDiskMark’s small
file benchmarks.
In CrystalDiskMark’s 512KB read and write
tests the Western Digital scored 40MB/s and 56MB/s 0 speeds that were only
beaten by the SSD-based LaCie drive. It performed well with even smaller files
too: its 4KB read and write scores of 0.5MB/s and 1MB/s were, again, towards
the top of this test’s results tables.
It’s
possible to add password protection to the disk, backup and restore files,
check the drive’s safety and securely format the hard disk
It wasn’t all plain sailing, however. The
Western Digital’s minimum read and write speeds of 6MB/s in ATTO were partnered
by mediocre maximum read and write results of 108MB/s and 107MB/s, and that
made for average read and write speeds of 84MB/s in both tests.
Elsewhere, there are few surprises. A USB
3.0 drive is included along with every other drive here and we like Western
Digital’s SmartWare application, which includes plenty of options for hard disk
management. It’s possible to add password protection to the disk, backup and
restore files, check the drive’s safety and securely format the hard disk.
The
Western Digital’s minimum read and write speeds of 6MB/s in ATTO were partnered
by mediocre maximum read and write results of 108MB/s and 107MB/s
Western Digital’s My Passport isn’t a
flashy or exciting bit of kit, and it lacks headline-grabbing features like
wireless access, free apps or SSD-based memory.
It does, however, have a reasonable turn of
speed, a colossal amount of space on offer and extremely good value: its $165
asking price works out at just 6p per gigabyte, which is the lowest figure on
offer here by a significant distance.
It’s for these reasons that the My Passport
has crept under the radar to take the crown in this test. Other drives might
appeal with flashier design or features, but this is the best way to get a huge
amount of external storage without breaking the bank and that’s why it’s taking
home an award.
