WD My Passport Wireless Pro Review
WD My Passport Wireless Pro Wired and WiFi Storage Performance
To test out performance on the WD My Passport Wireless Pro we’ll be using a free and popular storage drive benchmark called CrystalDiskMark. This 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. 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.
Let’s take a look at wired performance on the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 interface.
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 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 Pro 2TB model topped out at 112 MB/s read and write on the sequential test when we ran the drive on the CrystalDiskMark storage test with the default settings.
What happens when you unplug the USB 3.0 cable and run the same benchmark with the drive wirelessly?
Benchmark Results: Performance on the WD My Passport Wireless Pro 2TB dropped to 2.5MB/s read and 6.3MB/s write on the sequential test when we ran the drive on the CrystalDiskMark storage test when we were connected to the unit over 2.4GHz WiFi. The 2.4GHz wireless performance is down in the pro model as the original series had a 2×2 2.4GHz 802.11n solution and this model uses a 1×1 2.4GHz 802.11n solution.
Benchmark Results: When connected to the 5GHz WiFi connection we had 11 MB/s sequential read and 23 MB/s sequential write speeds, so there is a pretty big difference between the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands with regards to performance! The 5GHz band doesn’t reach that far on the WD My Passport Wireless Pro, but if you can use it most certainly do!