wd my passport or seagate backup plus for mac

Wd my passport or seagate backup plus for mac portable#
Wd my passport or seagate backup plus for mac software#
Wd my passport or seagate backup plus for mac password#
Wd my passport or seagate backup plus for mac iso#

Western Digital recently added another My Passport product to the family. It does show up on the My Passport downloads page, so it could just be an oversight.

Wd my passport or seagate backup plus for mac software#

The Ultra ships with WD's Discovery software that you can download your social media and cloud storage data (Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, and Google Drive), but the regular My Passport doesn't list this software on the official product page. The Ultra 4TB model currently sells for $128.99 at Amazon, but we found the non-Ultra 4TB My Passport for $119. Western Digital did a very good job positioning the My Passport Ultra, but the lower cost My Passport presents an interesting challenge. I still feel that the number one issue for these commodity products is simply pricing. Most of us don't want to worry about those, or any other, issues when we are shopping for a simple device to tackle a simple task. You can spend a lot more and get faster performance, but you will have the typical RAID 0 overhead, decreased reliability, and increased expense and complexity.

Wd my passport or seagate backup plus for mac portable#

The My Passport Ultra is the fastest palm-sized, single drive, portable HDD we've tested with mixed workloads. The drive can write data very quickly and pulls away from competing products when you need to transfer small blocks of data. Western Digital simply skipped over the write performance, which is clearly the unsung hero, on the specification sheet. You can even add a 'return-if-found' message that someone would see if they plug the drive into a system that doesn't have the encryption software installed.

Wd my passport or seagate backup plus for mac password#

On the other end of the usefulness scale, the password protected hardware 256-bit AES encryption is great if you travel with the drive. For instance, a portable drive that you mainly keep in a travel or work bag won't do you much good as an automated backup destination for your home PC. How much value you get from these 'value add-ons' really depends on what type of user you are. Some users will simply ignore the software features and others will embrace them. This product is the fastest non-RAID palm-sized portable HDD available.

The My Passport Ultra also performs extremely well in this test. The backup directory test uses a mix of small, medium, and large files and is the equivalent of transferring your My Documents folder in Windows.

That's a 50% decrease in the amount of time it takes to write the data. The game directory test uses mostly small blocks, and the My Passport Ultra has a 10 second lead over its nearest competitor and a 20-second advantage over the LaCie Porsche Design 4TB. That allows it to write at a much higher rate of speed. This tells us the DRAM buffer and cache are collecting the incoming random data and then passing it to the platters as sequential data. The My Passport Ultra, even during a 100% random write workload, doesn't make the sound or even vibrate much at all. Over the years the sound has been called many things, but 'rock grinder' may be the best description. Typically, you can hear the drive working hard when you read or write small blocks of data to an HDD.

The My Passport Ultra 4TB's advanced cache system helps it to outperform those two products when we add the smaller blocks in the game directory and backup directory tests.

Wd my passport or seagate backup plus for mac iso#

The Western Digital My Passport Ultra 4TB trails the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim 2TB and LaCie Porsche Design 4TB in the Blu-Ray ISO transfer test by 54 and 40 seconds, respectively. The Directory Test is a 15.2GB block of data that contains a mix of images, software installations, ISO files, and multimedia that yields a nice real-world workload. For the Game test, we transferred data from a game directory to the portable drives. We tested transfer performance with a Blu-ray ISO. We often see performance measured in throughput, but t ime-based results are easier to interpret because the sense of time is universal. Most of us simply read and write large pieces of data for archiving or transferring data from one location to another. Even though it is possible, you shouldn't run an operating system on these drives. We don't run many application tests on external or portable storage products because the typical workload is sequential in nature.