WD My Passport SSD 256GB USB 3.1 Gen.2 SSD Review

Introduction Today we take our storage on the go, or at least we can do so with ease. I have the WD My Passport SSD with a 256GB capacity in the office and I think we'll keep it there. A review full of benchmarks is better than me telling you a story of my walk with the My Passport SSD. My Passport SSD is portable storage with fast transfers and password protection options with hardware encryption. The drive is shock-resistant, compact, durable, and it also looks quite fancy. Pocket-Sized Storage There are more important criteria with portable drives than you might think, but the My Passport SSD fulfils them well. First of all, a portable drive needs to be small and light. You'll want to be able to take it anywhere, but you don't want to notice that you do. The drive is only 10mm high, 90mm long and 45mm wide while weighting nearly nothing. So that's a check on the list. Compatibility is another important factor and we got that covered too. While the drive is using the latest USB standard, USB 3.1 Gen.2 with 10Gbps bus speed, it is fully backwards compatible. The drive itself features a USB-C port and there's a Type-C to Type-C cable included. However, WD included a Type-A adapter for systems without the new and clever Type-C port. Durability Matters The My Passport SSD isn't the best protected external drives, but it still has a good resistance. It is built to withstand a drop of up to 6.5 feet (1.98 meters), for example. My Passport SSD is engineered from the ground up by Western Digital to be a quality drive, inside and out, to deliver reliable performance. It also has a natural shock resistance as any solid state drive has. Since there aren't any moveable parts, there's less that could be damaged. Capacity and Performance Despite the small size, you can get the My Passport SSD with up to 1TB capacity, but I have the 256GB version in the lab today. There's also a midway capacity with 512GB. All of them are backed by a 3-year warranty. The only official speed rating is that it can deliver up to 515MB/s throughput. That isn't a lot, but luckily we'll have plenty of benchmarks in this review to satisfy our curiosity on that part. Ready to Use and Loaded with App Installer WD made sure that the drive is ready to be used right out of the box, at least if your operating system supports exFAT. If not, then you always have the option to reformat it to NTFS or something else. The original partition does contain some useful things, making everything ready to use as it is. You can also download all those things from official product support page, but why bother if you don't need to. The included software pieces are WD Discovery for WD Backup, WD Security and WD Drive Utilities. The WD Backup software makes it easy to automatically back up high-capacity files to your drive or Dropbox cloud service account. Best of all, it works on a set it and forget it principle. It is also compatible with Apple Time Machine, but that will require a reformat too. Password Protection is another option and the My Passport SSD comes with hardware encryption. With it, you can password protect your files and keep them protected with a 256-bit AES encryption. The last piece of software, the WD Drive Utilities, is the general toolbox which will work with and detect all your WD drives. Product Video This is the official product introduction video. It isn't long and doesn't contain a lot of information, but it's still worth including. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAAEsp_sV1Y Feature Highlights Transfer speeds up to 515 MB/s USB 3.1 Gen.2 with Type-C interface Type-C to Type-C cable and Type-A adapter included Hardware Encryption engine 2-meter drop protection Light and portable Up to 1TB capacity Specifications The specifications are valid at the time of review. They might be subject to change in possible future revisions of the product. It is unlikely to change, but it is possible. Package and Accessories The front of the box shows how the included drive looks along with a list of the most important features. The rear side has more information about the product and its compatibility. Besides the My Passport SSD, you get a welcome and getting-started guide as well as a warranty guide in case of a worst-case-scenario. You also get a cable to connect the drive, naturally. The cable is a Type-C to Type-C cable for use with the latest generation USB hosts. There's also a Type-C to Type-A connector included for compatibility with traditional USB ports. Software Bundle WD packed software right on the My Passport SSD before they packed it up. The benefit for you is that you don't need to download it if you want to use it. While that is true, there might be a newer version available online and it's worth checking out. WD Discovery The WD Discovery software will help you maintain all your portable WD drives. Once installed, it will quickly find and list all connected drives. Drives aren't the only thing WD Discovery can do. It also helps to group your other WD apps and allows you to install the available list. WD Drive Utilities Every good drive also needs a software box to keep track of the drive as well as perform maintenance tasks. WD has their Drive Utilities for this and it looks like this. You can run tests, check on the SMART data, or securely erase the content of the drive. Testing & Methodology In a bid to make our testing as thorough and as accurate as possible, we have devised a testing methodology that will give us the maximum amount of data. While this means that testing each drive will take considerably longer – easily up 36 hours – the overall picture that we can gather is bigger too. It helps both you as the reader and us as the reviewer’s to gain a clearer view of the drive’s overall performance, strengths, and weaknesses. It also provides a more accurate analysis on how each drive performs under different conditions. Data Fillage There are many ways to test a storage drive, and we have chosen to include close to every test possible. We will start with a typical benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various village scenarios. However, depending on how a drive is built, the performance may differ depending on how much data it is already storing. Testing this, the drive will be tested empty as well as with 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage. For these tests, we will be using Anvil’s Storage Utilities, AS SSD Benchmark, ATTO Benchmark, and CrystalDiskMark. Application and Gaming Besides these synthetic fill tests, the drive is tested with PCMark 8’s storage benchmark to get real-world performance results. Plain Drive Performance Following the fillage tests, the partition gets removed, and we check the drive’s raw performance. These tests will determine the hardware’s capabilities while eliminating any interference from the set file system. AIDA64’s storage benchmark and IOmeter are both great tools for this, and they help us paint an even clearer picture of the drive. The IOmeter tests I run are quite different from the rest as they will give a final result after a longer performance test rather than a maximum or average score; this gives us yet another view of the tested drive over the regular tests. Drive Conditioning Durability is a vital factor when it comes to NAND-based drives as the chips only can be rewritten so many times before they’ll stop working properly. Modern SSDs come with wear-level algorithms to increase the lifetime and reduce this factor as much as possible. We also take this into consideration in our reviews even tho it would take years to simulate this under real-world conditions. Luckily, Anvil’s Storage Utilities comes with an endurance test that can perform this action much faster, but it is still a time-consuming process. process. Depending on the hardware, this can easily take several days, and we write thousands and thousands of small files in various sizes and compressibility to drive over and over. Following this conditioning process, all of the previous benchmarks will be run again in the same scenarios and the same order. This will give us a great view on how a drive will perform after prolonged usage, and that is a very vital factor when you pick out your storage drive. The Preparation and In Between The drive will be formatted as NTFS with default settings, as most users will do. The quick format option isn't used as that might affect the performance the first time data is written. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn’t something to worry about for regular users. However, for these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. After all, we want a clear picture of the drive’s performance with minimal interference from the operating system. On each page that follows with the benchmark results, I have inserted result screenshots from the benchmarks, created drive analysis chart for the fill-level performance, and added drive comparison charts where possible. Hardware Supermicro C7Z270-PG Intel Core i7-7700K Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400MHz (4x8GB) Toshiba OCZ VX500 512GB SSD be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 (1200W) Noctua NH-D15S Cooler Master HAF XB EVO with Noctua NF-A14 FLX fans Software AIDA64 Storage Benchmark Anvil's Storage Utilities AS SSD Benchmark ATTO Benchmark CrystalDiskMark IOMeter PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark Windows 10 AIDA64 AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users with a broad range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. The app has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one I'll be using. Fresh Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives us a view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Conditioned Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives us a view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Drive Performance Analysis Anvil's Storage Utilities Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a complete benchmark solution used to test any writeable storage drive. It also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to deliver days, months, and potentially even years of use in a shorter period. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Performance Analysis Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill. AS SSD Benchmark The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD, and they aren't using the operating system cache. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Performance Analysis Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill. ATTO 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 customise your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Performance Analysis Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD and SSD benchmark utility that allows you to measure a drive's sequential and random performance. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Performance Analysis Drive Comparison For the purpose of drive comparison, I will be using the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data-fill. IOMeter IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. As a benchmark and troubleshooting tool, it is configurable to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS. Sequential Performance Random 4K Performance PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark PCMark 8 Storage benchmark tests the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and SSHD hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of games. You can test any recognised storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Final Thoughts Pricing and Availability At the time of this review, the WD My Passport SSD with a 256GB capacity can be yours for £99.00 and $99.99 through Amazon. Conclusion This was the first portable SSD from WD which I had the pleasure to review and it was a joy from start to end. Everything works as it should, but that's no big surprise. The company has more than a few years of experience and they've created a great little drive. I had the 256GB version in the lab today, but there are larger 512GB and 1TB versions available too. The larger capacities do not increase the physical size and as such keep the drive very portable. It is light and it is small, perfect for a portable drive. It doesn't matter what you'll be using the drive for, whether it is for work or pleasure, it will be a smooth experience. At least if everything goes as it did for me. No complaints what so ever. The bundle itself is nice too. Besides the drive and USB-C to USB-C cable, you also get a small adapter for USB-A ports. This makes it compatible with older devices while retaining the user-friendliness of USB-C. Why bother with the old annoying 3-turn plugs when you have the reversible these days. You also get a nice software package along with the drive. Looks are subjective, but I quite like the WD My Passport SSD and it looks even better in real than it does on the photos. When I first saw it in PR shots, I wasn't really sure. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't like it either. Something seemed off. But it turns out that's just a result of the design in combination with photos. They just don't do the drive justice. Pros Good performance Small and light Up to 1TB capacity Nice bundle Cons None "WD My Passport SSD is compact and light while being fast and having plenty of capacity. Everything you'll want on a portable drive." We would like to thank Western Digital for this sample.