Portable Storage has been here for a while. It’s not something which we rarely see these days. Almost everyone of them has their own Portable storage drives. Gone are days when we used to lug around 32G,64G flash drives. Now it is an essential part of any working person.
But the dilemma here is – with so many companies making portable hard drives & with their price per TB coming down, which one is providing the best value for money? The notble players in the segment are WD, Seagate & Toshiba. We reviewed a Seagate drive last year which had the worst reliability score, even without any mishandling the drive worked only for 7 months before it catastrophically failed, leaving some of the precious data unrecoverable. But when WD decided to provide us with a 1TB portable hard drive, we decided to review it.
The RE-view
The My passport drives were very popular due to their durability & reliability. We had a 1.5TB My Passport drive with the older design (which is now used for My Passport Elements) & it ran straight for 9 years before it failed.
The portable hard drive we got was the yellow colored one. The new design is very minimal & it looks like two halves are joined together to make the outer covering – while in reality it isn’t.
The cable also comes in the color matching to that of the the drive itself. The quick start guide contains information about WD Backup software, WD Utilities & about a whole bunch of software which we weren’t bothered about. The port used is the standard hard drive connector port – and a status LED is beside it which blinks during file transfers.
Performance Test
The real review lies in here. To better test the device, we sought to clean format the drive. It had some preloaded WD software for Windows & Mac computers which was deleted while we formatted the drive. The chosen filesystem was exFAT since we needed the drive to be cross-compatible with other devices which do not natively support NTFS (like MacOS).
As you can see it offers decent read speeds of 123.2Mbps for sequential read but for the random read tests the speeds go down to 560kbps. The write speeds are also good at 98.6Mbps its not bad considering the value for money factor coming into play. The random write speeds are faster than random read speeds at 9.24Mbps.
This is expected performance from a WD drive. From our experience, WD drives typically have better write speeds compared to Seagate which tops out in read speed tests. If you’re that guy who doesn’t install & play games directly from your portable hard drive, which requires faster read speeds – then this drive is for you.
Or if you need better access times, go for a Seagate drive, but the tradeoff will be durability & reliability. Seagate drives do fail more than their WD counterparts.
We hope you liked the review, tell us which drive you’re using in the comments below.
