WD My Passport Edge External Hard Drive Review
Test System and SANDRA
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with an SSD for the OS and benchmark installations. Our testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI mode was enabled. The drives inside the external storage unit were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.
Let’s be clear from the get-go here; the My Passport Edge is not going to smoke any of the drives in our test bank in terms of performance. The HDD inside is a slim 5400RPM job with a SATA 3Gbps interface, which isn't cutting edge by any means. It’s important to keep in mind that the My Passport Edge’s primary strengths lie elsewhere, but we want you to see how its performance relates to other HDDs to get a more comprehensive picture of the unit’s performance.
Let’s be clear from the get-go here; the My Passport Edge is not going to smoke any of the drives in our test bank in terms of performance. The HDD inside is a slim 5400RPM job with a SATA 3Gbps interface, which isn't cutting edge by any means. It’s important to keep in mind that the My Passport Edge’s primary strengths lie elsewhere, but we want you to see how its performance relates to other HDDs to get a more comprehensive picture of the unit’s performance.
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Processor - Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Hard Drives - |
Hardware Used: Intel Core i7-3770K MSI Z77 MPOWER (Z77 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 4GB Kingston DDR3-1600 OCZ Vertex 4 SSD 128GB (OS Drive) WD Caviar Green 3TB WD Velociraptor 600GB WD Velociraptor 1TB WD AV-GP 3TB Hitachi Deskstar 3TB Seagate Barracuda 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64 Intel 9.2.0.1030, iRST 10.5.1027 DirectX 11 NVIDIA GeForce 306.97 Benchmarks Used: HD Tune v4.61 ATTO v2.47 CrystalDiskMark v3.01 x64 PCMark 7 SiSoftware Sandra 2011 |
First we ran SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run without formatting and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.
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The little 5400RPM My Passport Edge delivered a respectable score in the Physical Disks test and showed a nice balance between read and write speeds. It didn’t come close to the performance of the other drives in our bank, but that’s to be expected.
