The carabiner loop in the SanDisk Extreme / PRO line has proved to be a useful complement to the gumstick form-factor enforced by the usage of a M.2 NVMe SSD. The industrial design of the units is quite different, each appealing to its own target market.
A Type-C to Type-A adaptor is supplied, similar to the ones with the previous generation external SSDs from Western Digital. The two products are packaged similarly and both come with short (15cm) USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C to Type-C cables.
The company provided us with review samples of the 1TB versions of the My Passport SSD as well as the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD v2. The Extreme v2 is of particular interest here, as both the feature set and the performance specifications tally with that of the My Passport SSD. Today, the company is launching the SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD v2 (along with the Extreme PRO Portable SSD v2). Western Digital brought NVMe support to their My Passport SSD product line last month. In 2020, we have seen the market move en-masse to NVMe SSDs behind a USB 3.2 Gen 2 bridge for this market segment.
Traditional SATA SSDs (saturating at 560 MBps) can hardly take full advantage of the bandwidth offered by USB 3.2 Gen 2. High-performance external storage devices use either Thunderbolt 3 or USB 3.2 Gen 2 for the host interface. This review discusses the performance and characteristics of Western Digital's latest offerings (2020 catalog) supporting USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) speeds. While those speeds can be achieved with Thunderbolt 3, mass-market devices have to rely on USB. Thanks to rapid advancements in flash technology (including the advent of 3D NAND and NVMe) as well as faster host interfaces (such as Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.x), we now have palm-sized flash-based storage devices capable of delivering 2GBps+ speeds.
The drive’s performance is on par with the rest of the competition, and its software bundle is useful.External bus-powered storage devices have grown both in storage capacity as well as speeds over the last decade. It lacks hardware encryption and the three-year warranty, but is more than likely to pack the same hard drive as the My Passport Ultra.Īll in all, consider the My Passport Ultra if you want the lengthy three-year warranty and absolutely need a Type-C connector. Then there’s the other more affordable WD portable hard disk drive, the 4TB Elements, which retails for a smidgen under $100.
Plus the Seagate drive comes with a two-month complementary membership to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan worth $20. In a mature market where the upper limit for portable hard disk drives seems to be 4TB – we tested one of this size back in 2015! – there’s little need or desire to innovate, with pricing becoming the sole metric these drives are judged on.Īgainst the likes of the Seagate Expansion, which costs 25% less, the lure of a three-year warranty and a Type-C connector might be diminished. With a three-year warranty by default, a useful set of utilities, a reasonable retail price and decent performance, the WD My Passport Ultra 4TB (2019) marginally improves on an already good product. The WD My Passport Ultra does get relatively warm in use and produces an audible hum (about 48dB if you put your ear to it – not that you’re likely to do that, of course). Our standard 10GB test file was transferred in just under 100 seconds, making this one of the slowest drives we’ve tested recently. We don’t know the cache capacity, but what we can observe is that it generally performs worse compared to the G-Tech 2TB mobile USB-C drive, which is likely to contain a 2TB single platter version of this drive. What we know is that this hard disk drive has 5,400RPM platters, probably two of them, each with a 2TB capacity, hence the increased thickness. You can buy it (WD40NMZM) from eBay, but it will cost four times the price of the WD My Passport Ultra 4TB portable drive – the laws of supply and demand at work! This storage solution uses an OEM drive that’s not available on the open market – WD’s laptop drives have a maximum capacity of 2TB.
Here’s how the WD My Passport Ultra 4TB performed in our benchmark tests:ĬrystalDiskMark: 127MBps (read) 124MBps (write)Ītto: 130MBps (read, 256mb) 122MBps (write, 256mb)ĪS SSD: 122MBps (seq read) 113MBps (seq write) Performance