Performance
I’m going to start off with just a few quick benchmarks of the My Passport Ultra 4TB.
HD Tach
HD Tach is an older hard disk benchmark software, in fact I had to run it in Windows XP compatibility mode to get it going. As you can see, HD Tach shows the My Passport Ultra as having an average sequential read speed of 208.5MB/s.
CrystalMark
CrystalMark shows the My Passport Ultra as performing considerably slower than HD Tach, with both sequential read and write around the 120MB/s mark.
ATTO
ATTO Disk Benchmark confirms what CrystalMark stated, both read and write is around the 120MB/s mark.
Real-Life Usage
It’s all well and good looking at benchmark figures, but I wanted to see what these figures translated to when I used the My Passport Ultra 4TB in normal everyday usage.
Admit it, we have movie files stored away and transfer them around. Whilst a 650MB movie file took a matter to write and read off the My Passport Ultra, a 1080 HD movie file of 4GB did take a lot longer. My main PC is ran off a 256GB SSD of which only half of the capacity is used up. using Western Digital’s backup software, my entire system was dumped onto the My Passport Ultra in just under 30 minutes.
So the My Passport Ultra turns out to be a decent storage device, but what about using it as part of your everyday work? Documents such as Word or Excel files load up with ease, but when it came to more heavy duty work such as editing RAW photo files or video editing, the drive lacked the speed needed and your system would lag.
The design of the My Passport Ultra is quite sturdy with its metal casing, and whilst Western Digital boast that it has the same reliability of its other drives, I do not recommend shaking it about or else risk damaging the internal workings.
