Setup & Testing
Getting the WD My Passport SSD setup and running is extremely easy, just plug it into an open USB Type-A (using the adapter) or Type-C port on your computer. Once plugged in Windows will automatically detect it and you’ll be good to go. The drive is formatted as exFAT by default and the 1TB version has 931GB of usable space.
The drive is not empty, it comes with the WD Discovery software for both PC and Mac. This software brings in all of WD’s apps and allows you to protect the drive. You can easily set a password for your drive. The Discovery software will allow you to install other WD apps as well. I sort of like that they are not installed by default.
For testing we will be running the WD My Passport SSD against other portable solid state drives we have on hand so you can see the difference between the drives. As a reminder WD lists the speeds of this drive as 1050 MB/s read and 1000 MB/s write. First up we have CrystalDiskMark.
As you can see we have sequential speeds of 1007.60 MB/s read and 991.02 MB/s write. Here is how the Extreme Pro compares to other drives in that test.
Next we run the the AJA System test. It tests different types of video formats and gives you throughput results for the drive. Our configuration was 4K RED HD footage, 1 GB test file size, and the 8bit YUV codec.
And those results compared to other drives.
Next up is the USB Flash Benchmark, which will transfer various different file sizes to the drive and record the transfer speeds.
We have also added the AS SSD Benchmark and ATTO Disk Benchmark to our portable storage testing.
