WD My Passport Wireless 1TB Storage Drive Review
WD My Passport Wired and Wireless Storage Performance
To test out performance on the WD My Passport Wireless we’ll be using a pair of free and popular storage drive benchmarks. These will give a quick look at the performance of the portable storage device and you can then download the benchmarks yourself and compare it to what you already have or do some math and figure out the approximate time it would take to move the files sizes you often work with. First up let’s take a look at wired performance on the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface. The drive comes formatted in exFAT in order for it to read and write files wirelessly from both Windows or Mac computers. We left the file format in exFAT for testing.
ATTO v2.47
ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant in the SSD world. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5KB through 8192KB transfer sizes with the total length being 256MB.
ATTO – Overlapped I/0:
Benchmark Results: ATTO showed WD My Passport Wireless maxing out at 115 MB/s read and 110MB/s write in the standard overlapped I/O benchmark.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 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) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.
Benchmark Results: The WD My Passport Wireless 1TB drive scored 113MB/s read and write on the sequential test when we ran the drive on the CrystalDiskMark storage test with the default settings. The 512K test shows 41MB/s reads and 22Mb/s writes.
What happens when you unplug the USB 3.0 cable and run the same benchmark with the drive wirelessly connected to our systems 802.11ac wireless solution?
Benchmark Results: Performance on the WD My Passport Wireless 1TB drive dropped to 5.8MB/s read and 7.6MB/s write on the sequential test when we ran the drive on the CrystalDiskMark storage test with the default settings. Oddly, out 4K random transfer rates improved when we went wireless.