Hey, everybody. It's Lon Seidman and we're taking a look today at the WD My Passport SSD.
This is another external SSD, and I love these things no matter who makes them.
And we're going to take a look and see what WD's offering can do
and compare it maybe to some of the other ones that we have looked at.
This one starts at $99 for the 256 gigabyte version,
the 512 gig version is $180, that might be the sweet spot in their configuration.
There's also a one terabyte version for $360. And that's the one that we have here.
And this was provided to the channel free of charge by WD,
however all the opinions you are about to hear are my own,
nobody is paying for this review and no one is reviewing this content before it is posted.
I should also mention that WD was a past sponsor here on the channel,
but they are not sponsoring the channel currently.
So let's get into this and see what it's all about.
So, let's take a closer look at the hardware, now. This one is made out of plastic,
unlike the Samsung T3 we looked at a few months ago that was made out of mostly metal,
but it does feel pretty sturdy, nonetheless a nice high-impact plastic.
It doesn't really feel like it will fall apart on you at all.
It is a solid-state drive of course, so there are no moving parts and just by that nature,
it will be more rugged than a traditional spinning drive might.
It does have a usb type-C connector here at the bottom and it also supports the new USB 3.1 Gen2 standard,
so it'll give you theoretically 10 gigabits per second of data across the cable,
but no drive that I've seen can saturate that much cable bandwidth.
But we'll take a look and see how much data we can push out over this drive in a few minutes with it.
Now this connector here is compatible of course with any new USB type-C computer,
but it's backwards compatible to older ones, too.
So, the cable they give you in the box here is of course a USB-C cable,
but there's an adapter and all you have to do is just attach it like so and we have the arrows aligned here,
and you can plug it into a USB 3.0 plug or an even older 2.0 plug,
so anything dating back to the dawn of USB should be compatible with the drive.
It comes formatted for the Mac or Windows out of the box
and of course you can reformat it to whatever you wish with it, so pretty basic there.
And it really performs like any external hard drive would.
So, let's see how it performs now.
We're going to plug it into my Mac and run some performance benchmarks on it.
So, I have the drive now connected up to my Mac via USB type-C of course
and I'm running the Black Magic Disk Speed Test,
which is a way of measuring how much sequential data we can write to it,
like if we were recording videos or copying photos to and from the drive for example.
And we're getting speeds of around 300 megabytes per second or so on the writes
and on the reads we're seeing about 425 megabytes per second.
I usually let these tests run for a little bit to see if the drives can sustain these speeds over time
and this is about what I'm seeing here.
So it's performing slightly below the Samsung T3 that we looked at recently, but it's in the same ballpark.
So I think you can expect very similar performance out of this,
as you would out of the drives that Samsung is making for around the same price.
So it is performing like other drives in its class, but just a little slower,
especially on the writes, compared to the Samsung.
And I also ran the Crystal disk mark test which is run in Windows.
And that does a different kind of test where it does a lot of random reads and writes, kind of the things
you would experience playing a game or actually booting an operating system off of it for example.
And on that test we got a random read score of 21.51 megabytes per second
and a random write score of 26.87 megabytes per second.
So, it's a little behind the Samsung on the writes here again, but about on par with the reads.
So, I think as far as how this drive performs, it will perform a little slower than the Samsung will in writes,
but about the same speed when you're reading data, but to be honest if you're transferring photos back and forth,
you probably won't notice a huge difference in those kinds of operations.
But if you really need the maximum performance, at least in my testing,
the Samsung on the write side is the one that is currently faster of the two.
And they both again cost about the same.
Now, I really like using solid-state drives for video editing,
infact most of the videos I have edited here on the channel over the last three years
were edited on solid state drives because I can use them anywhere.
Even on a train as I was doing last week going to New York City,
because you can move them around, there's really no risk df damaging your data,
because again there are no moving parts.
But they're also very fast and what I've got here is a Final Cut Pro project,
what's called a multi camera Final Cut Pro project
and what I'm doing here is streaming two simultaneous 4K streams,
because I can switch back and forth to different angles,
and assemble and edit this way and sometimes I do this when I'm doing some stuff out in the field.
I shoot two 4K sources and I want this stuff to playback smoothly while I'm editing so I can work more efficiently
And that's one of the things solid state drives deliver to you,
most of the time on the spinning hard drives I can't get this level of performance,
but on solid state drives like this one I can and that is one of the reasons to look at these,
beyond their ruggedness, is that they are very fast as fast as the RAID array was a couple of years ago.
You got in something this small that you can carry around with you
and of course the density now, a terabyte, onto something like this size, is just awesome.
So overall, this is a pretty decent drive.
It's a little slower than the Samsung when it comes to writing back and forth to it,
but I think it is in the same ballpark, they cost about the same, they have the same warranty.
So, in many ways, they've made a drive that is as good as its competitor,
although it's made out of plastic versus metal on the Samsung.
One other reason though, perhaps WD has the edges with the included cable,
especially if you're using a Mac with the usb type-C connector,
because Samsung gives you a cable that goes from USB type-C to the larger USB connector: this connector.
Whereas WD gives you the USB-C connector in the box along with an adapter for the older format there,
so you can plug it into either connector, whereas on the Samsung,
you'll probably have to buy another cable to hook it up to your usb type-C port directly.
Small issue, but that can mean the difference here between two products that essentially cost the same.
This one has the ability to plug it into both types of connectors right out of the box,
the Samsung, at least at the time that I'm recording this video, requires you to buy a second cable
to be able to connect it up to your usb type-C computer, like my Mac here.
So little differences here, but overall a good drive. I was using this to video edit over the last week or so.
No problem, seems to be performing quite well and as expected. So, another great little external SSD out there.
We've got lots to choose from now. I'm very excited we're seeing so many of these.
And as more come out, I will review them here on the channel.
I've got a full playlist of all of the external SSDs I've looked at, down below in the video description.
This is Lan Seidman. Thanks for watching.
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