In fact, the bus power consumption peaks at around 3.8W, compared to 4.1W for the Seagate drive. The WD My Passport is more power efficient compared to the Seagate Backup Plus Portable at the same capacity point.

The pictures below present the power consumption profile in a compact and easy to compare manner. For bus-powered devices like the WD My Passport 5TB, Plugable's USBC-TKEY power delivery sniffer was placed between the host PC and the storage bridge to record the power consumption. CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2's benchmark traces with a region size of 8GB and the number of repetitions set to 5 are used. Power consumption is measured while processing the same workload on each of the DAS units. The Backup Plus Portable was only slightly higher at 48C. In addition, we see that the WD drive finished at 47C at the end of our robocopy workload. Storage Enclosure Thermal CharacteristicsĪs we have seen in the performance section, the Seagate Backup Plus Portable has higher peak transfer rates, but the WD My Passport is more consistent. Readers can click on the graphs below to view the full-sized version. Unlike the 2016 WD My Passport, the latest version allows monitoring of the temperature as long as a volume is configured.

Internal temperatures can only be gathered for enclosures that support S.M.A.R.T passthrough. In order to identify the effectiveness with which the enclosure can take away heat from the internal drive, we instrumented our robocopy DAS benchmark suite to record various parameters while the robocopy process took place in the background. Higher temperatures tend to lower the reliability of the drives. The thermal design of the enclosures for HDD-based DAS devices is important because hard drives can't withstand as high a temperature range as flash-based devices. In addition to the performance numbers and value additions that have already been discussed, consumers also need to look at other factors like thermal performance and power consumption for external storage devices.

Wd my passport x review