Western Digital My Passport Wireless Review
by Ganesh T S on December 3, 2014 4:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- Gadgets
- Mobile
- wireless storage
DAS Benchmarks
The primary purpose of the My Passport Wireless device is to act as a storage extension for mobile devices. Connecting the device to a 'Home Network' SSID also exposes two folders as CIFS shares, Public and sd. The latter is only accessible if a SD card is available in the device's SD slot. Data can be transferred between a PC and the device via these CIFS shares. That said, the My Passport Wireless also doubles up as a high-speed portable hard drive (with all the traditional WD utilities such as WD SmartWare that are supplied for portable hard drives). The internal disk is pre-formatted in exFAT in order to be compatible with multiple operating systems. Transfer of large-sized media collections / libraries and periodic computer backups are best done through the USB 3.0 interface and not via Wi-Fi. In order to evaluate this aspect of the My Passport Wireless, we utilized the testbed outlined in the table below to test the DAS performance. One of the USB 3.0 ports hanging off the PCH was used to connect the My Passport Wireless.
| AnandTech DAS Testbed Configuration | |
| Motherboard | Asus Z97-PRO Wi-Fi ac ATX |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-4790 |
| Memory | Corsair Vengeance Pro CMY32GX3M4A2133C11 32 GB (4x 8GB) DDR3-2133 @ 11-11-11-27 |
| OS Drive | Seagate 600 Pro 400 GB |
| Optical Drive | Asus BW-16D1HT 16x Blu-ray Write (w/ M-Disc Support) |
| Add-on Card | Asus Thunderbolt EX II |
| Chassis | Corsair Air 540 |
| PSU | Corsair AX760i 760 W |
| OS | Windows 8.1 Pro |
| Thanks to Asus and Corsair for the build components | |
The full details of the reasoning behind choosing the above build components can be found here.
Our testing methodology for DAS units takes into consideration the usual use-case for such devices. The most common usage scenario is transfer of large amounts of photos and videos to and from the unit. The minor usage scenario is importing files directly off the DAS into a multimedia editing program such as Adobe Photoshop.
In order to tackle the first use-case, we created three test folders with the following characteristics:
- Photos: 15.6 GB collection of 4320 photos (RAW as well as JPEGs) in 61 sub-folders
- Videos: 16.1 GB collection of 244 videos (MP4 as well as MOVs) in 6 sub-folders
- BR: 10.7 GB Blu-ray folder structure of the IDT Benchmark Blu-ray (the same that we use in our robocopy tests for NAS systems)
| WD My Passport Wireless 2 TB robocopy Benchmarks (MBps) | ||
| Write Bandwidth | Read Bandwidth | |
| Photos | 39.38 | 96.98 |
| Videos | 85.27 | 94.99 |
| Blu-ray Folder | 90.41 | 97.38 |
The above benchmark run was also instrumented to record the drive temperature as well as instantaneous transfer rates during the process. The internal disk temperature was less than 45 C even after more than 127 GB of writes and 127 GB of reads continously.
For the second use-case, we take advantage of PC Mark 8's storage bench. The storage workload involves games as well as multimedia editing applications. The command line version allows us to cherry-pick storage traces to run on a target drive. We chose the following traces.
- Adobe Photoshop (Light)
- Adobe Photoshop (Heavy)
- Adobe After Effects
- Adobe Illustrator
Usually, PC Mark 8 reports time to complete the trace, but the detailed log report has the read and write bandwidth figures which we present in our performance graphs. Note that the bandwidth number reported in the results don't involve idle time compression. Results might appear low, but that is part of the workload characteristic. This is not the intended use-case for portable hard drives, but the results are just presented here for the sake of completeness
| WD My Passport Wireless 2 TB PCMark8 Storage Benchmarks (MBps) | ||
| Write Bandwidth | Read Bandwidth | |
| Adobe Photoshop (Light) | 51.92 | 2.18 |
| Adobe Photoshop (Heavy) | 62.47 | 3.01 |
| Adobe After Effects | 20.19 | 2.35 |
| Adobe Illustrator | 39.26 | 2.28 |
WD also aims to make the device easy to use as a DAS by supplying a 'Quick View' program. It presents a unified interface for DAS tasks such as drive mapping and temperature monitoring. It can also launch WD SmartWare (the continuous backup program) from within the interface if it has already been installed.
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name99 - Thursday, December 4, 2014 - link
A laptop also a lot larger than a disk...If someone both wants to take their iPad on a cruise AND wants to take a large number of movies to watch, this is a more convenient solution.
That may not be what you want to do (it's not what I want to do) but I think it's silly to immediately say "I don't need this product therefore nobody does". I'm not in the market for maternity jeans, but that doesn't mean that there is NO market for maternity jeans, or that people who buy maternity jeans are stupid and don't realize what they really want to buy is miniskirts.
probedb - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
But this is not it's designed use case as already stated. A friend at work bought one as it's ideal for him, instead of taking a bulky laptop/notebook on holiday he takes this and a tablet for viewing photos. Less bulk than he used to carry around.Arbie - Thursday, December 4, 2014 - link
A similar product but with an SSD might be better. Much less space - but still a lot - and much less power and weight; these matter more in a portable.name99 - Thursday, December 4, 2014 - link
SSD requires substantially higher power than a mechanical disk when writing. That's why very few SSDs run reliably off a single USB2 connection.And the disk is not performance limited by the mechanicals anyway --- in the expected usage model it is limited by WiFi.
frodbonzi - Sunday, December 7, 2014 - link
SSDs are DRAMATICALLY more expensive.... to get 2TB of storage in an SSD would cost over a grand... $200 is only going to get you 256GB... you can get that in an SD Card nowadays.... the point of this is to provide LOTS of storage that your mobile device doesn't already have!marvdmartian - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
But honestly, who needs 2TB of writable storage for their phone or tablet? How many movies can you possibly watch? How much music does the average person have in mp3 format? How many photos can you take, and how much storage capacity will it require, especially when you're talking lower resolution cameras on phones and tablets?Personally, I put a 128GB SSD into an external drive case, and can plug it into the micro-USB port of my tablet or phone. Even if I'm loading 720p videos on it at home, it would allow me to bring more movies or TV shows on vacation with me, than I'd ever have time to watch. If I want to write to something, I'll bring along extra micro-SDHC cards, or USB jump drives.
Patriot came out with a wireless drive case a few years ago (called the Gauntlet Node), that works great with wireless devices, and allowed you to put your own 2.5" drive inside. You could run it plugged into a USB power source (>1 amp) or run it up to a couple hours on its own internal battery. Cost of the case was usually around $100, so dropping a drive you already had into it would be less expensive than this offering from WD. Too bad it seems they never sold well, so Patriot stopped making them, because I'd consider that a much better idea than this WD drive.
marvdmartian - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Looks as though there's still some new units out there for sale, if anyone wants to check out the Patriot WiFi enclosure:http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Gauntlet-Hard-drive-...
~$60 now, free shipping.
You have to use their app (supported by Amazon's Fire tablets, as well as Android and Apple), but if you're looking for a simple way to allow your kids to watch movies on their tablets, while you're traveling, this is worth looking at. I also forgot to mention that it supports up to 3 different wireless streams at one time.
frodbonzi - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I'd like to point you to a similar comment given already... if a device isn't something YOU need, don't assume that there is noone else who needs it!!There ARE people who need more storage.... hence this 2TB solution - and plenty of others.... If you are only in the market for 128gb, go buy one - but don't comment here saying noone needs this!
marvdmartian - Tuesday, December 16, 2014 - link
In the immortal words of Sergeant Hulka, "Lighten up, Francis."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pA1h1FjBZg
tbutler - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
"But honestly, who needs 2TB of writable storage for their phone or tablet? How many movies can you possibly watch?"Completely missing the point. The use-case is not to have 5000 hours of movies/MP3s/etc. to stream straight through; it's to have *your entire media library* with you wherever you go. So you don't have to guess 'Oh, I'm going out of town for the week, which movies am I going to want to see?' - you've got them all. All your songs, so you're not missing that one song your friend in Indianapolis wanted to hear. No need to pick and choose. Simple.
The 'cheap laptop' post is also completely missing the point. This is something my sister can pack along in her purse, turn on, and let the kids stream from on long road trips - no muss, no fuss, no maintenance, and the battery lasts a lot longer than that cheap laptop will.