Then there’s the other more affordable WD portable hard disk drive, the 4TB Elements, which retails for a smidgen under $100. Plus the Seagate drive comes with a two-month complementary membership to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan worth $20.

In a mature market where the upper limit for portable hard disk drives seems to be 4TB – we tested one of this size back in 2015! – there’s little need or desire to innovate, with pricing becoming the sole metric these drives are judged on.Īgainst the likes of the Seagate Expansion, which costs 25% less, the lure of a three-year warranty and a Type-C connector might be diminished. With a three-year warranty by default, a useful set of utilities, a reasonable retail price and decent performance, the WD My Passport Ultra 4TB (2019) marginally improves on an already good product. The WD My Passport Ultra does get relatively warm in use and produces an audible hum (about 48dB if you put your ear to it – not that you’re likely to do that, of course). Our standard 10GB test file was transferred in just under 100 seconds, making this one of the slowest drives we’ve tested recently. We don’t know the cache capacity, but what we can observe is that it generally performs worse compared to the G-Tech 2TB mobile USB-C drive, which is likely to contain a 2TB single platter version of this drive. What we know is that this hard disk drive has 5,400RPM platters, probably two of them, each with a 2TB capacity, hence the increased thickness.

You can buy it (WD40NMZM) from eBay, but it will cost four times the price of the WD My Passport Ultra 4TB portable drive – the laws of supply and demand at work! This storage solution uses an OEM drive that’s not available on the open market – WD’s laptop drives have a maximum capacity of 2TB. Here’s how the WD My Passport Ultra 4TB performed in our benchmark tests:ĬrystalDiskMark: 127MBps (read) 124MBps (write)Ītto: 130MBps (read, 256mb) 122MBps (write, 256mb)ĪS SSD: 122MBps (seq read) 113MBps (seq write) Performance

1 tb wd my passport for mac