WD My Passport 500GB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive Review

Testing
Once you have formatted your drive you will see that there is 465GB of usable space.

ss11

To test our drive we will be using 3 different programs: HD Tune Pro, ATTO Disk Benchmark & CrystalDiskMark.

First up is HD Tune’s Read benchmark.

hdtune read

Here we can see good results with an average speed of 74MB/s.  Next we ran HD Tune’s file test, which is actually two tests.

hdtune file

Good results for the sequential read and write tests with speeds around 89MB/s.  The file test shows us that transfer speeds of most files over 16KB were around 70-90MB/s.

ATTO Disk Benchmark measures transfer rates across specific lengths.  ATTO uses RAW data, our transfer sizes ranged from 0.5 to 8192kb.

atto

Here again we can see that once the drive hits that 16KB mark speeds remain around 80MB/s maxing out at 89MB/s.

CrystalDiskMark has a sequential read / write test as well as a 512k and 4k random read / write test.

crystal

As you can see the sequential tests are right up there in the 90MB/s range.

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