My Passport Pro
High-performance, high-capacity storage on the go – a pro’s dream?
A Thunderbolt portable drive
For many professional Mac users, portability is as important as power. And Western Digital is tapping into that market admirably with this portable, buspowered Thunderbolt drive.
It offers two 1TB drives (a 2x2TB version is also available), configurable in striped RAID 0 (meaning it acts as a single 2TB drive and offers the highest possible transfer speeds) or as RAID 1 mirrored (so it appears as a 1TB drive, but with the data stored on both drives, so it’s safe in case of failure in one). Both of these modes are useful for pros in different ways, and it’s easy to switch between them using WD’s provided tool for OS X.
Performance was really strong in the striped mode, reaching 204MB/s for both read and write speeds in BlackMagic’s Disk Speed Utility stress tests – good enough for pro-level 1080p video work.
With smaller files, it averaged 162MB/sec for sequential read and 142MB/sec for sequential write, which are also great. Random reads were 19MB/sec and random writes 41MB/sec, which is expected, and still fairly good for hard drives – this is where SSDs excel. In the mirrored mode, the transfer speeds were consistently about half of the striped mode, which is what we expect, and were fairly normal speeds for portable hard drives.
WD has really hit a sweet spot of performance, capacity and price here, in a nicely made chassis. However, WD’s tools don’t offer any encryption options, and the fan keeping the drives cool is ludicrously loud – possibly intrusively so if working with audio. Matt Bolton
A great balance of capacity and speed without SSD pricing – but, oh, that fan gets really, really loud!