Earlier this year WD released the first ever portable dual-drive storage, the WD MyPassport Pro. Powered off a Thunderbolt port, the WD MyPassport Pro is targeted at creative professionals and multimedia enthusiasts who want the speed of internal storage but want it in a portable form-factor. Today we have the WD MyPassport Pro for review and we have the 2TB model, one of the two capacities available which are 2TB and 4TB, and we’re gonna look closely at what WD is bringing to the creative professional industry here.
Rated at up 233MB/s read performance, the WD MyPassport Pro is definitely up there with most internal drives but you get the convenience of a portable storage that can fit in your work backpack or portable workstation. The device is powered straight off the Thunderbolt port which removes the need for a power cable and also serves as a high-speed connection to your Thunderbolt-capable Mac. The drive is formatted for Mac and allows user-selectable RAID configurations like RAID0 for performance and RAID1 for redundancy and also JBOD config for non-critical applications, or if just want it that way.
Specifications
- Capacities: 2TB, 4TB
- Connection: Thunderbolt
- Performance: 233MB/s seq
- Form factor: 2.5″ HDD x2
- Warranty: 3 years
Closer Look
The WD MyPassport Pro is packaged in a bright yellow box with a shot of the product on front and details in the back. Made of thick cardboard, the outer packaging protects the inner box which houses the WD MyPassport Pro inside. Nothing much included inside except for some documentation.
WD took a whole new approach to their WD MyPassport Pro in terms of case design. Whilst it still retains the signature silver/black colorway of their Mac line, the full metal body is also thicker due to the dual-drive internals and also has grills and vents for cooling. The most notable design change is the integrated Thunderbolt cable which wraps around the sides of the WD MyPassport Pro.
Tearing down the case we can see the internals of the MyPassport Pro. The internal drives are WD Slim linked together by a SATA daughterboard which is then connected to the primary PCB. A small cooling fan is located on of the sides to aid in keeping the drive cool in active use. The drive is boasted to have high shock resistant and the metal brace is lined with rubber spacers that spread the shock through the chassis instead of the drives.
Here is a closer look at the WD MyPassport Pro with the chassis taken out.
From this angle, we can also see the stack of 2 WD Slim hard drives that serve as the heart of this portable HDD. Notice the Thunderbolt cable is routed-straight to the PCB via delicate ribbon wire so we highly recommend AGAINST servicing these yourself unless you know what you are doing.
We’re using an ASUS Z97-DELUXE motherboard with an ASUS Thunderbolt EXII expansion card to test this drive in place of a Mac. We’re looking for performance here, so we’re setting the drive to RAID0 to see the maximum potential speed we can get out of this device.
Potential Performance (ATTO) – RAID0
WD Was just a wee bit conservative in their rating as we can see this drive topping our at around 238MB/s read and 227MB/s write performance. That’s pretty solid for a portable hard drive. For comparison, the WD Velociraptor 1TB HDD tops out at 200MB/s with the WD Black FZEX just a bit close of that. Note that both of drives are high-performance desktop drives. This is a portable drive you can lug around in your bag.
Benching in Crystal DiskMark also yields us similar results which is nice to see as the drive is very consistent.
Conclusion
At $299 for the 2TB model and $429 for the 4TB variant, WD is seriously asking for a premium with the WD MyPassport Pro. Unlike the WD Black2 though, the price is well-warranted. WD is targetting professionals using Thunderbolt-capable Macs for their workflow who need larger capacity than what their MacBooks come with.
We still do note that the price is still quite high considering one may opt to settle for a slower drive USB3.0 drive. Another setback faced by the MyPassport Pro is the the fact that WD doesn’t state that you can service the device yourself in case of drive failure. This technically extends the purpose of the RAID1 configuration as you’ll be hard-pressed to find a WD Slim in the wild regularly.
All those considered though, there is still a market for the WD MyPassport Pro: digital photographers, film makers and graphics artist who need a portable way to bring their work around in the field and not be held down by the speeds of traditional connectivity. Thunderbolt gives a way for these people to enjoy the speeds of native internal connection allowing them freedom to create without limit.
The WD MyPassport Pro is backed by a 3-year warranty. We give the WD MyPassport Pro our B2G Recommended Award.
Looks like 2 fiooe11 together…wished it had wifi backupability
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Looks like 2 fiooe11 together…wished it had wifi backupability
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