WD My Passport SSD 256GB Review

WD has a number of drive ranges sitting under the My Passport banner including the WiFi equipped My Passport Wireless Pro, all based around standard hard drives. However the latest addition to the range, the diminutive My Passport SSD offers a different level of performance altogether to the rest of the family. At launch, the My Passport SSD range consists of three capacities, 256GB, 512GB and the flagship 1TB model. WD supplied us with the entry level 256GB drive for reviewing purposes. Going by the size of the My Passport SSD, the drive inside it is a M.2 format SSD. The drive it uses a USB 3.1 Type-C interface. There are no details in the specification information on WD's website as to the NAND type and the make / model of the controller. Using the CrystalDiskInfo utility, the drive inside the case is recognised as a SanDisk SD8TN8U256G2000. This corresponds to SanDisk's X400 drive which means it uses 15nm TLC NAND and has a Marvell 88SS1074 4-channel controller. WD quote transfer speeds for the drive of up to 515MB/s and back the drive with a 3-year warranty. Physical Specifications: Usable Capacities: 256GB, 512GB and 1TB. NAND Components: TLC NAND Interface: USB 3.1 Type-C Form Factor: External NAND Controller: Marvell 88SS1074 Dimensions: 90 x 45 x 10mm Firmware Version: X4161100 The My Passport SSD comes in a smart yellow and white finished box with a image on the drive on the front together with a panel displaying its capacity, drive performance, length of warranty, its ability to survive being dropped and icons representing WD's backup and Security utilities. The rear of the box has some multilingual marketing data about the drive along with list of what's in the box and the drives compatibility. The pocket sized My Passport SSD small enough to fit in the palm of the hand and it looks good too with a plastic case that is split 50:50 between plain black and a metallic finish. But beware, this metallic finish is a fingerprint magnet and will need constant cleaning to keep it looking smart. The drive has been built to withstand a drop of 1.98m. Bundled in with the drive is a USB-C cable together with a useful USB Type-C to Type-A adapter and a quick install guide. Pre-installed on the drive is WD's Discovery software. This gives you access to WD Drive Utilities app as well as options to install WD's Security and Backup Utilities. It also offers a choice of 3rd party apps to download to either try or buy, including Acronis True Image, Plex, easet DriveSecurity - antivirus for external drives and Blancco File Eraser. WD's Drive Utility enables status checks to be run on the drive along with two drive scans (Quick and Complete). Data on the drive can be permanently erased using the Drive Erase option. WD Security utility allows the implementation of hardware encryption (the drive has 256-bit hardware encryption built in) and password protection on the drive. WD Backup allows the easy setting up of backup and restoration plans for backing up of data. The drive comes factory formatted in the exFAT file system, but to test the drive we reformatted it to NTFS. Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. WD quote transfer speeds of up to 515MB/s for the My Passport SSD, which was confirmed by the ATTO benchmark. The 256GB drive produced a Sequential read score of 517MB/s and 531MB/s for writes. It's very nearly as fast as Samsung's T5 for reads with an identical write performance. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. We set IOmeter up (as shown above) to test both backup and restore performance on a 100GB file. When dealing with the 100GB file in the Backup/Restore tests, the My Passport SSD's read performance far exceeds the write peformance. The WD My Passport SDD performs well throughout the throughput tests. There's a significant dip in the read performance at the 256KB block size level but the drive recovers well. No such problems with the write performance with a nice smooth performance curve for the most part. To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO. 100GB data file. 60GB iso image. 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files. 50GB File folder – 28,523 files. 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files). 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images). 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files). 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo. BlueRay Movie. When it comes to handling the real life data transfers the read performance of the My Passport SSD is much faster than write. It took just under 5 and a half minutes to copy the contents of the 60GB Steam folder to the drive and just over 3 and a half to read the data back. The My Passport SSD is the lastest member of a large family of portfolio of external drives produced by WD, and needless to say with an SSD inside it, is the fastest My Passport drive to date. Not only does the drive look good (although the metallic part of the finish attracts finger prints like a moth to a flame) and perform well, it's pretty tough too, designed to survive a drop of 1.98m. The official performance transfer rate figure for the drive is up to 515MB/s which we were able to confirm with the ATTO benchmark, which produced a read score of 517MB/s and 531MB/s for writes. Real life file transfers saw read performance touch the 500MB/s mark on a couple of occasions; when dealing with the 100GB data file and 60GB iso image. However, the write performance of the My Passport SSD was left somewhat in the shade producing just over 200MB/s for most of the tests with the exception of the 60GB Steam Folder (187.4MB/s) and the 50GB file folder (162.6MB/s). The drive does support the TRIM command but it needs to be reformatted from the out of the box exFAT file system to NTFS. Another useful feature especially for a drive that can be carried around and could be prone to be either lost or stolen is the 256-bit hardware encryption which is set up via WD's Security app. In addition to the security app the drive also comes with WD's Backup software as well as access to some useful 3rd party apps including Acronis True Image, Plex, easet DriveSecurity, which is antivirus software for external drives and the Blancco File Eraser app. We found the 256GB My Passport SSD available for pre-ordering at Overclockers UK for £109.99 HERE Pros Performance. Physical Size. Hardware encryption. Cons Pricey compared to other My Passport drives. Kitguru says: It may not have the capacity of some of its larger siblings but the diminutive My Passport SSD outshines them all in the peformance front.

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WD My Passport SSD 256GB Review

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