WD My Passport SSD 2020 1TB Portable Drive Review

CrystalDiskMark, AJA System Test, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

CrystalDiskMark 7.0.0h x64

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) and shows the highest score of five runs.

CystalDiskMark:

Benchmark Results: The WD My Passport 1TB drive is rated at up to 1050 MB/s read and 1000 MB/s write. On our AMD X570 platform we managed to reach 1023.37 MB/s read and 935.57 MB/s write. This is just shy of the drives top speeds, but not too far off.

Benchmark Results: When compared to other portable USB drives the WD My Passport SSD 1TB portable drive from 2020 is the second fastest drive that we’ve ever run on this platform!

Benchmark Results: With the queue depth lowered to just one the performance dropped down to 732.5 MB/s read and 850.2 MB/s write. This is is a bit more realistic than testing a portable drive at a queue depth of 8.

Benchmark Results: Almost all of the drives get less performance at QD1, but the WD My Passport SSD (2020) 1TB managed to remain in second place with the second fastest sequential write speed of the group. The sequential read dropped by nearly 300 MB/s when we tested at QD1 versus QD8, which is why we show this result.

AJA System Test

AJA System Test:

AJA System Test by AJA Video Systems measures system disk performance using video test files of different resolutions, sizes and codecs. We selected the standard 4K UltraHD resolution, a test file size of 1GB and the ProRes 4444 codec to see how this drive does with regard to video rendering performance. ProRes 4444 is used for heavy effects work and deep color projects. We changed the default test file size from 1GB to 16GB to better represent real-world usage. The results from this benchmark help content creators with regards to rendering expectations, throughput, file read/write expectations for transfers and that kind of thing.

Benchmark Results: The AJA System Test results had the WD My Passport SSD (2020) 1TB external drive topping out at 938 MB/s read and 814 MB/s write. The write throughput dropped right at the end of the benchmark, but the lowest speeds seen were still well above 300 MB/s write.

Benchmark Results: That makes the WD My Passsport SSD 1TB from 2020 nearly 65% faster than the WD My Passport 1TB from 2018 on this benchmark. It also happens to be the fourth fastest on the write test for this benchmark!

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

Blackmagic Design has a storage drive benchmarking tool that customers can use to test the speed of your disk performance for working with high quality video at different resolutions and codecs.

Benchmark Results: The WD My Passport 1TB (2020) drive topped out at around 896 MB/s read and 866 MB/s write on the Disk Speed Test by Blackmagic. The results show this drive will only struggle with 10-bit YUV 4:2:2 video tests at 2160p50 and 2160p60! Very impressive result and shows content creators that the WD My Passport SSD lineup are very capable drives.