hey everybody it’s la inside and we’ve got another portable solid state drive to check out this one from wd this is their my passport ssd and i was very pleased with the performance that i saw out of it and we’re going to explore what this external hard drive is all about in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure this came in free of charge from wd however all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this drive is all about now the price point on this starts at around 85 for a 500 gigabyte version and goes up from there the drive we’re looking at today is the one terabyte version which i think at the moment is the sweet spot from a pricing and storage perspective but if you want a larger drive they have a two terabyte and a four terabyte version available but those are much more expensive there is not much to this thing it is basically just a simple external hard drive you plug it in via the usb connector here at the bottom you get a usb type c cable in the box that is rather short as you can see if you have to connect up to a larger usb a port you have that option with the included adapter here i would be really careful with this adapter
with any other usb cable because when you’re using one of these adapters you have to get the orientation correct and so as you can see they’ve keyed it so that you can only get it inserted in this orientation it won’t plug in if it’s upside down here but it might plug into another usbc cable that’s not keyed like this one is so just be really careful because sometimes if you reverse these connections you can burn out a device so just be warned about that if you need to you can buy a longer cable this is standard usb here so you shouldn’t have any issues finding a longer compatible cable but this is what it comes with now as far as compatibility is concerned this drive will work with just about anything that supports external usb storage that includes computers obviously along with tablets and tv boxes it also works with game consoles but know that if you’re on one of the newer next gen consoles like the ps5 or the xbox series s or x some of those new next generation titles do not run from external usb hard drives but what you can do is move some of your older games from the internal storage on the console to this so your original xbox one games your ps4 games your xbox 360 games all of those will run really nicely on here in fact it’ll probably run nicer on this than it would on the original consoles that those games were written for and then you free up your internal storage for those newer generation titles that are more demanding now the drive will come formatted with xfat but you can of course reformat it for whatever you want because it is just an external hard drive build quality on this feels pretty nice it’s got a metal casing here on the top plastic on the bottom it’s not
waterproof or anything but they do make through their sandisk division a ruggedized solid state drive that performs very similar this one is not waterproof but splash proof and it has some dust protection and it comes with a more rugged case that’s designed to be abused a bit more but i think for most people that generally stick to indoor activities this drive runs fine and it will perform about the same as that rugged sand disk does and speaking of performance i was quite pleased with how well this drive performed for the price point check out the writes here we’re pushing about 950 megabytes per second and we’re reading at just slightly under that around 927 megabytes per second or so this is probably one of the first drives that i’ve reviewed that actually writes a little faster than it reads but the performance here was very consistent over an extended period of time so i think the performance levels here on this drive are very very good now one thing to note though in order to get the performance that you see here you need to make sure you’re plugging your hard drive into a 10 gigabit per second usb port this is known as usb 3.2 gen2 these days and you’ll know your computer supports that because you will see this little marking on its connector if your connectors don’t have any markings you might want to refer to the technical documentation to figure out which port will work best with the drive for the best performance because many computers have slower ports and faster ports on the same unit and you have to plug it into the right one to get the best performance you can also get this performance by connecting it to a thunderbolt port if your computer supports that now that black magic test we just ran is what’s called a sequential read and write test where you write just a big file to the disk and read it back but it’s also good to know how the drive performs doing more random reads and
writes which is the kind of thing you would experience with a game or trying to run an operating system for example and so for that we run the crystal disk mark test now the first row on these results here is the crystal disk mark sequential test that one runs very similar to the black magic one and as you can see it’s writing faster on that test than it’s reading but the last three rows are the random reads and writes and this drive performed very well across the board on those and if you compare this drive to some of its competitors in the marketplace you can see that it’s actually doing really well especially compared against the samsung t7 which is a another strong competitor along with wd’s own sandisk extreme pro that we looked at a few months ago so the performance here is excellent for its price point and something that really surprised me as i was expecting something a little lower end in its performance profile now there is also an encryption feature that lets you lock the drive down with a password when that feature is enabled it does not appear to result in any performance degradation so that’s a good thing but if you are planning to use that password feature know that it requires software to unlock the drive and that software does not run on an ipad or a game console for example so if you really wanted a
drive that you can lock down and access i would look at the samsung t7 that has a fingerprint reader on board which doesn’t require any software to unlock this one’s a little more limited in how you gain access to the encrypted drive so overall this is a very nicely performing solid state drive for the money the compatibility is certainly there it’s running with my ipad mini through its usb type-c port right now i found that it works great as a backup drive especially if you have a large volume of data to copy over to it but it also appears to do very well with the kinds of activities that rely on random read and write performance like gaming or running an operating system for example so altogether it’s a great deal i think and if you’re looking for a solid state drive and don’t need the rugged casing this is probably something worth taking a look at that’s going to do it for now until next time this is london thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lawn dot tv supporters including gold level supporters hot sauce and video games brian parker chris allegretta tom albrecht thomas anfang jim tannis and handheld obsession if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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