WD My Passport Essential 500GB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Review

HD Tune Pro and HDTach Benchmarking

HD Tune Pro 4.61 is an extended version of HD Tune which includes many new features such as write benchmark, secure erasing, AAM setting, folder usage view, disk monitor, command line parameters and file benchmark.

Read Performance Testing

Benchmark Results: The WD my Passport Essential 500GB portable drive had an average read speed of 71.5MB/s with a burst speed of 154.5MB/s and an access time of 18.3ms. The read performance is fairly linear and started out at 92MB/s on the outer edges of the platters before slowing to 44MB/s on the inner sectors.

Benchmark Results: The WD my Passport Essential 500GB portable drive had an average write speed of 48.8MB/s with a burst speed of 124.5MB/s and an access time of 20.3ms. We were expecting slightly higher performance than this based off the other benchmarks, but the tests are repeatable.

File Testing

Benchmark Results: The file benchmark looks good with ~83 MB/s reads and ~80MB/s writes for most file sizes over 16KB.

HD Tach v3.0.4.0

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access
read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives
(ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device
drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers
of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of
the device possible.

Benchmark Results: The long test in HD Tach showed that the WD My Passport had an average read speed of 64.1 MB/s with a write speed of 51.1MB/s. The burst speed was 148.1 MB/s and the random access time was shown to be 2.2ms.