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Test: Western Digital 2.5″ HDD 2TB!

At the end of Q1, Western Digital has announced to bring out external HDDs
with 2TB capacity at the 2.5″ form factor. Tremendous HDD capacity on small
room. Easy to carry with you and without the need of an external power supply.
THE dream for those who archive lots of data? Let’s have a test review!

The drive itself comes to you for roughly 200USD (220CHF) MSRP. Local stores may have listed it for a lower price already.

What you get for it, is a tiny, yet solid crafted HDD in an appealing ABS housing that should protect the HDD from lighter outer impacts. Yet I wouldn’t recommend to treat this delicate device with harsh movements or shocks.

Let’s have a look at the casing, before, we go into details:

The casing has a nice-looking structure that also adds some grip!

18mm height is pretty big but the harddrive inside is already 15mm high!

108mm long – That’s really okay for the harddrive!

80mm width – Also okay for the harddrive!

compared to a 1TB Samsung HDD, the WD My Passport is just a bit higher.

When you unpack the drive, you have the drive and a USB3.0 USB-A to MicroUSB-B cable with approx. 30cm length. Other things aren’t packed inside. A driver disc is not included and not necessary. The SES-Driver is on the harddrive among other WD-Software. Under Windows Seven, the drive is instantly recognized and the driver is automatically installed.

The formatted capacity (1 NTFS partition) is 1.81TB (2.000.184.262.844 Bytes) – So 2TB using the 1000-rule. You get, what you paid for.

The USB3.0-interface allows data transfer rates at 5Gb/s, the drive however caps at 120MB/s maximum and 60MB/s minimum transfer rates. Thus the drive averages at 90MB/s which is good.
The access times rank between 16 to 20ms which are fairly OK. Sure there are other external drives that perform faster access seeking times but they’re ways smaller (500GB to 1TB).

During a hefty copy session, the drive did not get warmer than roughly 35°C – Easy going here!

Copying files using USB2.0, you may expect a maximum transfer speed of roughly 29MB/s – The USB2.0 does not allow more speed although in theory it should allow 60MB/s – Most of the speed is used for overhead and control data. So where USB3.0 comes with 5Gb/s you might expect 600MB/s in theory. I assume that a proper SSD in an external housing may top out at approx. 350 MB/s.

I could not find actual numbers however.

In conclusion you might say that the product is simply fine: lots of diskspace on small room, easy to carry around and easy to integrate. As always the drive comes with a 2 years warranty (typical for external drives from the consumer line, in which the My Passport series is placed.). Ideal for usage as backup and media storage drive.

No other manufacturer has such a big drive in it’s portfolio. Western Digital did the first step (again!).

So let’s see when this drive becomes available as internal drive also. Some notebooks would like to have such a big data harbor inside. At least those, whose HDD bay may take 15mm high drives, which are mostly DTRs in the 17 to 18″ reign.


July 5, 2012 Netspark - 1594 posts - Member since: May 9th, 2011 No Comments »

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