WD My Passport Ultra External HDD Review and Benchmarks

When it comes to hard drives, WD or Western Digital surely comes to the mind. So in this post, I am reviewing the WD My Passport Ultra 2.5 inch 1 TB External Hard Drive.



In the month of March 2014, I was looking for external hard drives. On 19 March, 2014, I bought WD My Passport Ultra 1 TB External Hard Drive for Rs 3779 from Flipkart as a deal was running on it. I did not check any reviews due to the deal. Later on,I came to know that it was the fastest hard drive on the market at that time. Now it is the second fastest external hard disk after Seagate Backup Plus Slim External Hard Drive as you can check on Top 10 Best External Hard Disks in 2014 in India to Buy Online.


The hard disk was delivered on 21st March, 2014. Now after using it for 3.5 months, I think it is the right time to do a thorough review.

In The Box Contents




Out of the box, I got the portable drive, a 15 inch USB 3.0 cable(compatible with USB 2.0), soft pouch, quick install guide and a 3-year limited warranty. Out of 1 TB , only 931 GB can be used for storage.

Design and Build

 The drive is light,compact and sturdy. The exterior shell is made of plastic which is good for home use and other applications ouside the home. The top of the drive features WD My Passport Ultra branding. The top side of the drive varies with colour which can be titanium, red, blue or black, in my case black. On the left side, there is a USB 3.0 connector which handles both data and power functions. This connector can work with USB 2.0 also.




 Speed Benchmarks
 I tested the drive with CrystalDiskMark and here are the results :



The read speed maxed to 88.35 MB/s while write speed maxed to 88.03 MB/s.
In the screenshot, we are only concerned with Sequential read/write(marked by red box) because it measures the speed of hard drive when it comes to the transfer of large files (e.g. installing programs, copying videos, programs, photo albums or music libraries from one hard drive to another). High sequential read speeds will also shorten the loading time for large programs such as modern computer games and video editing software.

I also tested read speeds with HD Tune Pro and here are the results :

 Here the minimum read speed was 46.9 MB/s and the maximum read speed was 104.1 MB/s.The avaerage read speed was 78.1 MB/s.

I also tried testing write speed but due to partitions in the drive, HD Tune did not allow write opeartion.

You can read more about Hard Drive Benchmark - How to Run a Hard Drive Speed Test.

Software
The drive comes with 3 softwares - WD SmartWare Pro for auto backup of data, WD Security for password protecting the drive and WD Drive Utilities for diagnostics testing.Honestly I did not like the softwares a bit.They are all laggy especially WD SmartWare Pro.Actually I can write more but a reviewer has summarised the crappiness of these softwares in this review on Amazon.com.

Capacities,Colour and Pricing
 The WD Ultra is available in three different capacities: 500GB, 1TB or 2TB. There are also four colour options: black, blue, red and titanium.

If you are going to buy WD My Passport Ultra external HDD ,I would recommend to buy an 1 TB or a 2 TB hard drive since 500 GB hard drive costs almost equal to 1 TB hard drive.

Buy WD My Passport Ultra 1 TB Now from :

Amazon India :  Red | Titanium | Black | Blue

Flipkart : Black | Red | Blue | Titanium

Snapdeal : Black | Red | Blue | Titanium

Amazon US : Black | Red | Titanium | Blue 

Buy WD My Passport Ultra 2 TB Now from :

Amazon India : Black

Flipkart : Black

Snapdeal : Black
Sequential read/write - measures the speed of your hard drive when it comes to the transfer of large files (e.g. installing programs, copying videos, programs, photo albums or music libraries from one hard drive to another). High sequential read speeds will also shorten the loading time for large programs such as modern computer games and video editing software. - See more at: http://www.buildcomputers.net/hard-drive-benchmark.html#sthash.YSfOCaPF.dpu

Comments

  1. Unknown9 July 2014 at 23:08

    Thanks sir...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Amazing Parli29 July 2015 at 13:06

    Hi Tarun, Thanks for such a wonderful site and your efforts to share your knowledge. I deeply appreciate it.
    After reading your pages, i had zeroed down on WD Elements 1 TB (No1 on your Top 10).
    But in this article you mention that Seagate Backup plus slim is faster ? Im confused ?
    Which one should i buy as my first EHDD ? Budget is not a constraint for me. I want the durable, fastest thats all.
    Thanks in advance !

    ReplyDelete

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