WD My Passport Essential SE 1TB USB 3.0

Full Review

The Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1TB portable hard disk drive gives competition a very good run for money, especially the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1TB. With USB 3.0 support out-of-the-box, the strategy of Western Digital cannot be faulted. Granted, not too many existing desktops/laptops support this faster USB interface, but most current-generation PCs and new laptops do come with this feature, so it is a good thing.

Is one Terabyte of storage capacity on-the-go sufficient for your movies, music and backups? Yes, I thought so. Let's go ahead and inspect its looks, features and performance as well.

Design
Seen upfront, this external storage drive is shaped closer to a square than the standard rectangular design. It is compact enough to fit even inside a jeans pocket, but the drive casing's height has a slight bulge. The glossy black plastic exterior of the unit we received is as likely to attract envious looks, as it is to attract fingerprints.

Like all 2.5-inch portable drives, the USB cable is sufficient to power it. Of course, this means it will not work on the front-USB ports of many PC cabinets, since those don't supply enough power in some cases. The other catch is that the USB cable used for this drive is not widely available yet, so don't lose it! I was not able to procure a USB 3.0 cable (blue-coloured connector on PC side) in shops without buying a drive that contained the cable in a retail box.


The precious USB 3.0 port on the drive's side.

Features
Internally, the portable drive casing houses a 2.5-inch laptop hard drive spinning at 5400 RPM. The drive has an 8MB cache and offers formatted storage capacity of 931.5 GB. For the paranoid, 256-bit AES hardware encryption is supported.

Interestingly, this drive did not get as warm to the touch as other USB 3.0 external drives I've seen so far, during testing. Western Digital offers a two-year limited warranty. You can view this drive's specs in an easier table-format, by taking a look at the "Specifications" tab of this review.

The retail box bundles WD's SmartWare management software for file backup. It will categorise data on both, your PC and the hard drive based on file extensions, so that you can then choose the file-types to back up. Sequential backups for up to 25 versions of the same file is supported. The interface of SmartWare is straightforward and easy to use, getting the job done with minimal fuss.

Performance
To prevent bottlenecks, we use our top-end test-rig for testing. When plugged into a USB 2.0 port on our testbed, it performed as well as any other USB 2.0 portable drive in synthetic benchmarks and real-world tests. This means the USB 2.0 interface itself was the bottleneck, and speed measured did not cross 33 MB/s even in the best-case scenario, as expected.

However, we were more interested in finding how it performs over the USB 3.0 intended for it. Among others, HD Tach RW was one of the synthetic benchmarks we ran, and its results can be seen below.


HD Tach RW: A speed graph of read and write performance, over USB 3.0.

Despite wide variations between different synthetic benchmarks, and multiple runs to be sure, the result in general indicated that this drive was at least 20 per cent slower than competitors. The write speed in particular, was pushed downwards pretty badly. Other USB 3.0 portable drives (that also spin at 5400rpm) were not affected as much.

Has WD done something to tune this drive to be less hot/noisy, at the cost of write speeds? Since most of a drive's usage is for read purposes, and a large proportion of users are only likely to use this drive on USB 2.0 systems, was this an easy way out? Either way, this will not matter to most users unless you are the sort who transfers hundreds of Gigabytes to and from the drive each day over USB 3.0 and thus will notice the writing-time difference.

On synthetic benchmarks we measured a read speed average of 65.7 MB/s and a write speed average of 37.3 MB/s - meaning a wide variance between read and write speeds. Read and write access times averaged 18.7 ms and 22.7 ms (milli-seconds) respectively, with a CPU usage of 7 per cent on average. The drive racked up a HDD Score of 4152 in PC Mark 05.

Real world tests were carried out when the drive was empty. File read/write speeds for a single large file (6.42 GB) stood at 83.5 MB/s and 70.4 MB/s respectively. File read/write speeds for multiple smaller files (1287 files totalling up to 2.33 GB) stood at 50.3 MB/s and 19.07 MB/s respectively. These performance numbers are quite good, unlike what I saw in synthetic tests.

Bottom Line

If you have a desktop/laptop that supports USB 3.0 data transfer, it certainly makes sense to get a portable drive that directly supports the faster USB port. The compact and high-capacity Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1TB USB 3.0 portable hard disk is a good buy with its aggressive pricing.

If you don't have a computer with USB 3.0 yet, getting Seagate's GoFlex 1TB drive is a better option, since that product allows for connectivity options that go beyond just USB.


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