[Kevin OBrien]

In this review we look at the 2TB Western Digital My Passport that uses a custom 2.5-inch 2TB hard drive inside.

2TB Western Digital My Passport Portable Hard Drive Review

[danwat1234]

I'm curious how the access time are with hdtach or whatever. Probably close to an average of 19ms.

[ChrisMcPole]

Mighty ugly outside and rather thick I would not trust it. 500GB with two platters is more secure that this multi-platter mess.

This post has been edited by ChrisMcPole: 26 March 2012 - 04:13 PM

[Brian]

Meh, in black it's pretty nice looking, I like the redesign of the My Passport family, though the Mac-oriented metal body is my favorite.

[Kevin OBrien]

danwat1234, on 26 March 2012 - 03:01 PM, said:

I'm curious how the access time are with hdtach or whatever. Probably close to an average of 19ms.

With IOMeter set to access the entire drive we measured an average 4K write latency of 10.59ms... read was in the 18.9ms range

ChrisMcPole, on 26 March 2012 - 04:13 PM, said:

Mighty ugly outside and rather thick I would not trust it. 500GB with two platters is more secure that this multi-platter mess.

Well from an external view the drive isn't any larger than the 1TB model we reviewed previously. Yes the internal drive is larger, but the consumer buying it would never know unless they cracked it open. From a reliability perspective though, its a unique drive. WD did this for the 1.5TB solutions in the past, but as such a unique design its hard to gauge long term reliability since there are so few of these drives out there.

[[ETA]MrSpadge]

Wow, didn't I complain about the lack of such offerings just a few weeks ago?!

@Thick: of course it's got to be thicker than slim drives at this capacity point. It's way thinner than 2 standard drives or a 3.5" drive, though.

@Reliability: in 3.5" drives more platters do not neccessarily lead to higher failure rates. And you shouldn't trust any single drive anyway. You could even view it this way: having more read/write heads, the accesses are spread among more of them, so the load of individual ones is reduced. Sure, the spindle has to work harder, but this can be engineered for.

MrS

[Brian]

Well if you get really worried about data redundancy on the go, there's always this...we actually use it in RAID1 for one of our multiple offsite backups.

http://www.storagere...mus_mini_review

[jameskatt]

My primary concern is the plastic case with no heat venting. These hard drives get very hot under constant use. Heat shortens their life tremendously.

This hard drive is only good for intermittent, short-duration use - such as daily backups - rather than daily continuous use. I would have preferred a metal body to improve heat dissipation - and some air vents.

My second concern is that the drive doesn't have a standard SATA connector. Thus, you cannot place the internal hard drive in a better case. You are stuck with its cheap plastic case.

This post has been edited by jameskatt: 12 August 2012 - 10:55 PM