Testing The 2 TB My Passport Pro

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 Disk Speed Test or IO Meter 2008 (512 KB sequential read) continuously. 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.

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.

Not surprisingly, the 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Pro proved to be the hottest-running portable hard disk drive, recording a maximum case temperature of 11.6 °C above ambient temperature. The ambient temperature we tested in was 30 °C, so the drive was a rather warm 41.6 °C. One can only imagine how toasty things would get if the drive didn't come with an integrated fan...

Sustained Read Transfer Rate

There is no doubt that the 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Pro was going to blow the other drives out of the water. In the RAID 0 mode, it was almost twice as fast as the other drives in large reads but about 3x as fast at small reads. In fact, its small read performance was consistent at around 138 MB/s, irrespective of whether it was in RAID 0 mode or otherwise.

Sustained Write Transfer Rate

The 2 TB Western Digital My Passport Pro was actually faster at writes - more than 3x faster at large writes, and about 4x faster at small writes. Of course, this is in RAID 0 mode. In the other two modes, it was only half as fast.

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