WD My Passport SSD 2020 1TB Portable Drive Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Large File Transfer and Game Load Benchmarks

Real World File Transfer

The first custom test that we are going to do is to show how fast each portable drive can read and write a compressed folder. For this we backed up a Steam copy of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for the test file. The compressed folder was 30.5 GB in size and we moved it to the portable SSD and then performed read test of that file.

WD Mypassport 2020 1TB Portable SSD Compressed File Read Write Test

Benchmark Results: The WD My Passport SSD 1TB portable drive finished this custom real-world file transfer test with a write speed 351 MB/s and that puts it in second place behind only the WD_Black P50 Game Drive. When it comes to read speeds it managed to read the compressed game folder at 803.44 MB/s and that is good enough for a 4th place finish just behind the Samsung T7 2TB portable SSD.

WD Mypassport 2020 1TB Portable SSD COD Warzone Directory Transfer

Our hardest test is to copy the entire the Call of Duty: Warzone game directory and then move it to the portable SSD. This file is just shy of 200GB in size and really hammers the portable SSD being tested as it is one long sustained write operation. The WD My Passport SSD (2020) 1TB portable drive finished the transfer with an average speed of 581 MB/s, which is over 71% faster than the WD My Passport SSD from 2018. Moving from a SATA to NVMe technology inside the My Passport SSD is clearly a game changer and the new WD My Passport for 2020 is without a doubt one of the fastest drives on the market today.

Game Load Time Testing

shadowbringers portable ssd test system

Game Load Time Testing
To test game load times we used the benchmark for the game title Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers that was released in July 2019. We bumped up the resolution from 1080P to 1440P, but other than that we left all the settings at their stock values. Pretty much every SSD on the market today claims to be aimed at gamers, so this test shows you how the drives we tested perform on an actual game title in a series that every gamer has heard of.

WD Mypassport 2020 1TB Portable SSD Game Load Times

Benchmark Results: Game load times are important to many as you can use a portable SSD as a game drive to store and even launch some of your game library. The WD My Passport 1TB from 2018 averaged 19.49 seconds on this game load time test and the new WD My Passport 1TB from 2020 completed the same exact benchmark at 16.14 seconds. So, you are looking at about a 20% improvement in game load times on this particular title. Western Digital went from being the fourth slowest with the model from 2018 to being the fourth fastest with the new 2020 model! That it not easy as we have 16 different portable SSDs that have been tested from companies like Samsung, Seagate, SanDisk, Lexar, Crucial (Micron), HyperX (Kingston) and ORICO.