Sustained Read Transfer Rate

The 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra Metal / Anniversary Edition is definitely a very fast USB 3.0 hard disk drive. It was particularly fast at large reads, delivering an 8.6 MB/s (9%) higher throughput than the 2 TB My Passport, and a 14 MB/s (16%) higher throughput than the 1.5 TB Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex. It was slower than the 1.5 TB FreeAgent GoFlex in small reads but only by 3 MB/s (5.8%).

Sustained Write Transfer Rsate

When it came to writes though, the 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra Metal / Anniversary Edition was the fastest portable hard disk drive in this comparison, particularly in Large Files test, where it bested the 1 TB Western Digital My Passport Slim and the 2 TB Western Digital My Passport by about 30 MB/s (46%)!

This is a big deal because writing 2 TB of large files to the standard 2 TB My Passport would take 8 hours 48 minutes, but only 5 hours 56 minutes with the My Passport Ultra Metal / Anniversary Edition!

This test also shows the importance of buying high-speed drives over commoditized drives like the WD Elements. It may be cheap, but filling up the WD Elements with 1 TB of large files would take 9.5 hours - more than 3x longer than the My Passport Ultra Metal / Anniversary Edition.

Maximum Surface Temperature

We monitored the surface temperature of the 5 external drives during their benchmarks. The following chart shows their operating temperature range, from idle to maximum load. Please note that instead of giving you the absolute numbers, we are showing the temperature delta, which is the difference between the actual temperature and the ambient room temperature.

Unsurprisingly, the 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra Metal / Anniversary Edition had a high surface temperature. We expected it to be hotter because of its aluminium top case, which transmit heat much better than the usual plastic case. This is actually good because the case acts like a heatsink, drawing away heat from the drive inside. The downside though is the drive will get a little too toasty to immediately handle after use.

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