WD My Passport 4TB 2016 Edition Portable External Hard Drive Review

WD My Passport 4TB Performance Benchmarks

CrystalDiskInfo is free benchmark that many people use to test storage drives with, but this test runs really quick and the results show the highest score of the five ‘burst’ tests for each performance metric tested. The problem is that the tests are so small and quick it rarely ever fills up a drives cache and is not a good look at real world performance on many external drives or SSDs that use TLC NAND Flash memory. We are including results for you to look at as you can use it at home to compare with to get an idea what the best case performance looks like on this drive.

We managed to hit 118.5 MB/s on the sequential read and 112.7 MB/s on the sequential write test, which is great considering the My Passport 4TB drive has a 5400 RPM hard drive inside.

ATTO Disk Benchmark showed that we were getting up to 118 MB/s read and 113 MB/s write speeds as well, so it looks like the WD My Passport 4TB portable drive has some solid performance numbers.

We wanted to do some real world file transfers, so we copied over an 8.1GB MKV Full-HD movie and found that we were getting around 104-110 MB/s on average. Solid performance, but as you can see sustained performance is a bit lower than the peak numbers shown in the ATTO and CrystalDiskMark benchmarks shown above.

The last test we ran was to take 17 MKV full length 1080P movies that we had on a secondary data drive and move them all to the WD My Passport 4TB drive. These movies added up to just over 66GB and we found that it took us just 10 minutes and 50 seconds to move them all over and that averages out to being about 105 MB/s. Most importantly the write performance was high and pretty flat for the entire file transfer. Temperatures went from 30C at idle up to 38C on the My Passport 4TB, but that is respectable after writing nearly 70GB of data.

Let’s wrap this up!