A Closer Look

The Western Digital My Passport Slim 1 TB portable hard disk drive supports USB 3.0 right out of the box. Hence, it uses the Micro-B USB 3.0 connector, which is a combination of a standard Micro-B USB 2.0 connector and a Micro-A USB 3.0 connector. This connector allows you to insert and use a Micro-B USB 2.0 cable in a pinch (if you lose the original USB 3.0 cable).

This new wider connector also allows for a more positive lock. This is useful for careless users who like to lift external drives by their cables - it makes it harder for the cable to dislodge and drop the drive, usually killing it in the process. However, this doesn't mean you should continue to do that with this drive!

Although this My Passport Slim drive supports USB 2.0 as well as the newer USB 3.0 interface, using it with a USB 2.0 port will cripple its performance as USB 2.0 has a maximum theoretical throughput of 480 Mbits/s, or about 33 MB/s in real life. Once you upgrade your computer to USB 3.0, you will instantly experience a marked improvement in this external drive's performance as USB 3.0 offers a maximum theoretical throughput of 5.0 Gbits/s, which would translate into a real-world throughput of about 400 MB/s. We will demonstrate in our benchmark tests how much difference USB 3.0 makes over USB 2.0.

Right next to the USB port is a power/activity LED light. When the drive is idle, it will remain lit. This changes to a slow flash - once every 2.5 seconds when the drive goes into standby mode. When the drive is actively reading or writing though, the LED light will flash approximately 3 times per second. So if you have a habit of directly unplugging your portable hard disk drives without first disconnecting them from Windows, make sure the LED light is either steadily lit or pulsing slowly. Do not disconnect the drive while the LED light is flashing rapidly.

Western Digital gave the entire My Passport Slim with a smooth matte finish - which is fantastic for keeping dust and fingerprints from sticking to the drive. However, the finish is bad for grip and for some reason (aesthetics maybe?), they didn't add any rubber feet to the base of the drive. So make sure you hold and place the drive carefully.

Western Digital included a simple black pouch with the drive. This is a generic pouch for 2.5" portable hard disk drives, so it fits the My Passport Slim with plenty of space to spare. You will have no problem using it with other portable hard disk drives.

We would prefer though if Western Digital had included a hard, padded case with the My Passport Slim, preferably one that is designed to match the My Passport Slim's colour scheme and slimmer profile. A rubber-lined metal case perhaps? Now that would have made the My Passport Slim stand out even more among the crowd of ordinary portable hard disk drives.

Hardware Encryption

The Western Digital My Passport Slim 1 TB portable hard disk drive supports full disk hardware encryption based on the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) using the 256-bit key length. That is the strongest AES cipher available, which ensures that your data will remain safe even someone steals the drive and attempts to break into it. In addition, the encryption and decryption is done directly on the drive itself, which means your computer's performance does not suffer as a result. In software implementations, your computer's processor would be used to perform those encryption and decryption calculations.

However, this feature is not enabled by default. To use it, you have to install the included WD Security software, which allows you to set the password (up to 25 characters) to encrypt the drive. Thereafter, you can unlock the drive using the same WD Security software or the WD SmartWare software. If you intend to use it with a computer that does not have either software installed, plugging in the My Passport Slim will launch a virtual CD containing the WD Drive Unlock utility, which you can use to unlock the drive.

Usable Capacity

This Western Digital My Passport Slim drive has an official formatted capacity of 1 TB. We checked that out by formatting it in NTFS using Windows 7.

The actual formatted capacity was 1,000,169,533,400 bytes. This is slightly (169 MB) more than the official formatted capacity. With about 125 MB allocated to the NTFS file system, the actual usable capacity was slightly above 1 TB.

The My Passport Slim drive actually comes with a suite of backup and encryption software (for Windows and Mac) stored inside. The software takes up about 285 MB of space. Even if you don't use it, it would be a good idea to store a copy elsewhere, just in case you decide otherwise later.

Testing The My Passport Slim

The Testbed

Testing Methodology

We tested in Microsoft Windows 7 with the latest updates. We chose to use IO Meter 2008 as well as our own suite of test files. Here are the details of the two sets of test files we used :

• Large Files : 5 high-resolution videos (2,002,511,061 bytes)
• Small Files : 2,527 mix of low, medium and high-resolution photos (2,000,704,583 bytes)

All transfer rate tests were timed using a Seiko WC73-4000 stopwatch with a rated accuracy of 10 ms. A minimum of 3 test runs were performed, with additional test runs undertaken if the results were off by more than half a second. The closest group of 3 run times was averaged to obtain the final result.

The case temperature results were obtained using a Fluke 62 Mini infra-red thermometer. The Load temperature test was carried out after at least 5 minutes running IO Meter (512 KB sequential read), with IO Meter continuing to run. The drives were allowed to idle for a minimum of 15 minutes before the Idle temperature test was performed. A minimum of 5 test spots were examined on each case, with the maximum test result used.

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