The My Passport Ultra, even during a 100% random write workload, doesn't make the sound or even vibrate much at all. Over the years the sound has been called many things, but "rock grinder" may be the best description. Typically, you can hear the drive working hard when you read or write small blocks of data to an HDD. The My Passport Ultra 4TB's advanced cache system helps it to outperform those two products when we add the smaller blocks in the game directory and backup directory tests. The Western Digital My Passport Ultra 4TB trails the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim 2TB and LaCie Porsche Design 4TB in the Blu-Ray ISO transfer test by 54 and 40 seconds, respectively. The Directory Test is a 15.2GB block of data that contains a mix of images, software installations, ISO files, and multimedia that yields a nice real-world workload.
2017 wd passport ultra vs 2015 wd passport ultra portable#
For the Game test, we transferred data from a game directory to the portable drives. We tested transfer performance with a Blu-ray ISO. We often see performance measured in throughput, but t ime-based results are easier to interpret because the sense of time is universal. Most of us simply read and write large pieces of data for archiving or transferring data from one location to another. Even though it is possible, you shouldn't run an operating system on these drives. We don't run many application tests on external or portable storage products because the typical workload is sequential in nature.