Load Times

In this test, we tested the Western Digital Elements Play (with an attached WD Passport Portable 160 GB external hard disk drive) and the Western Digital WD TV Live, recording the time it took to perform these tasks :

• Booting Up : from the time the power button is pressed to the time the player is ready for use.
• Detecting / Access Drive : the time it takes to detect and access an attached USB drive, or the internal hard disk drive.
• Loading Movie : the time it takes to load a large movie file (21,502.80 MB in size).

The Western Digital Elements Play started up much faster than the WD TV Live, and we were able to access the internal hard disk drive within 3 seconds. However, it was pretty slow at scrolling through the list of movies, and it took an average of 14 seconds to load a 21.5 GB movie. Overall, it took 36 seconds to get a movie playing from the time the power button was pressed.

The Western Digital WD TV Live, on the other hand, was much faster at scrolling through the list of movies. More importantly, it took only 5 seconds to load a 21.5 GB movie. It was also noticeably faster than the Elements Play at going back to the menu from the movie. Overall, the WD TV Live took 40 seconds to get a movie playing from the time it was powered up.

Despite the Element Play's overall shorter time to get a movie started, it feels pretty sluggish to use. This is pretty disappointing since it can directly access its internal hard disk drive, instead of going through the slower USB bus. It should be able to scroll through and load movies much faster than the WD TV Live, but it falls far short of that expectation in real life.

Disk Copy Time

Bet you are wondering how long it takes to copy 2 TB of movies to the Western Digital Elements Play's internal hard disk drive. Well, wonder no longer. We compiled a mix of high-definition and standard definition movies and video clips and copied them into the Elements Play using its USB cable. Here are the results :

In our real world tests, the average transfer rate was just a tad above 25 MB/s. It took us almost 21 hours to transfer 2 TB worth of files. Of course, you do not actually have to fill up the entire drive before using it. You always can load a few hundred GB of files first and top up later. A transfer of a hundred GB of files would require just over an hour to complete.

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