WD My Passport 1TB - Speed slower than usual or ok ?

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Ransome

Ransome

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Jul 24, 2012
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Heya,
I bought a brand new WD My Passport 1TB from Amazon. Tried it yesterday.
Updated the drive firmware using WD's FirmwareUpdater.
Also used WD Discovery software to check drive health - which passed successfully.

Plugged the external HDD via USB 3.0 cable to the USB 3.0 ports of my PC.
Tried 2 cables (the included short one, and another) and 3 different slots.
Also did the same with my new Asus Zenbook laptop.

Today I copied a large mass of files (pictures mostly and data) weighing up to 90.8 GB.
The drive copy speed started at around 90-100-110 then quickly dropped to the 60-ish area. Meaning 60 MB/s for the most part.
That's a lot slower than expected.
Took about 25 minutes to copy 90.8 GB without intrusions.

I decided to benchmark the drive, so I used CrystalDiskMark (latest ver) to check the drive - then compared it with images from reviews by Amazon buyers.
Got some really good drive speeds
135 Seq Q32T1 READ/ 122.5 WRITE MB/s.
128 Seq READ / 121 WRITE MB/s.

That's basically faster than the screenshots from Amazon reviews.
See image:
https://i.imgur.com/gxXOHn7.png
gxXOHn7.png

My benchmark scores are on the right.
I compared them to one of Amazon reviewers who reported high speeds.

So how come the actual write speeds are less than 50% ?

I noticed that yesterday - on my PC - which has a motherboard from 2011/12 - the USB 3.0 drive speeds hovered around 85/90-110 MBps when tranferring chunks of 20-30 GB. Most of the copy was at 90 MB/s.
So can it be that the larger the mass / more files - the slower the MB/s speed will be?

However my new Asus Zenbook Laptop's USB 3.0 was copying a big 90.8 gb (all the folders together in 1 go) at 60~ mbps.
It occasionally dropped to 20-40s or a even a few brief moments of 1 digit mbps/kbps.

See screenshot:
https://i.imgur.com/q6Tmasz.png
q6Tmasz.png

So, is this normal for an external drive of that type?
And how can you explain the big speed gap between the benchmark(s) and the actual work speed - when copying the real deal?

P.S: I even tried changing the drive Policy to "Better Performance" - but it didn't change a thing. So I took it back to "Quick Removal (Default)".
 
Solution
Snipergod87
File transfer speeds will drop ALOT if it is a bunch of smaller files, like pictures or documents, compared to large files like video's. You can see in the benchmark the sequential write's and read's are very high (this is what you would get with large files) but expect a fraction of the speed if it is bunch of smaller files like documents or pictures.

Also fragmentation of the drive can decrease performance abit.
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Snipergod87

Snipergod87

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File transfer speeds will drop ALOT if it is a bunch of smaller files, like pictures or documents, compared to large files like video's. You can see in the benchmark the sequential write's and read's are very high (this is what you would get with large files) but expect a fraction of the speed if it is bunch of smaller files like documents or pictures.

Also fragmentation of the drive can decrease performance abit.
 
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Ransome

Ransome

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(Updated and rearranged my post above, btw).
So you think the drive speeds are fine?
The reason I copied several chunks yesterday and only 1 big chunk today - is because yesterday I was preparing and copying my data - INTO the WD My Passport drive - from a WD Black 2TB internal drive. That's my BACKUP- which will be stored away.

Then I went to create a 2nd backup - backup for my backup - by copying the folders together - from my WD My Passport - to the Asus Zenbook's own Toshiba internal HDD.

I am actually very satisfied with the product:
It's super tiny! Sleek looking. Feels rigid and stable enough. It's not metal cased - but I'm fine with the light weight plastic. Best of all it runs very quiet and rather cool. Plug and play with just 1 cable.
My only major complaint is WD providing a ridiculously super short USB 3.0 cable - which forced me to think of creative ways to place the drive in a safe stable place (on chairs and stuff) when plugged to my case's back USB 3.0 ports.
Oh and maybe the fact that there's only 1 USB 3.0 port on the drive and it seems a bit fragile.


 
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Snipergod87

Snipergod87

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I think the speeds you are getting are perfectly reasonable. You can test copying a large file (few GB) if you have one and see what those speeds are, also depending on how full the drive is can reduce the speed by about 50% due to the data being on the inner tracks.

The cables can be short, in general I think USB 3.1 G1's max effective length is 1m possibly 1.5m but the cables you get from WD or other brand tend to be a few inches to a foot.
 
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Ransome

Ransome

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Thanks a lot for your reply.
Luckily I have a good (1 meter or more I think) USB 3.0 cable -supplied with an older WD Elements (one that died, a enclosure model). So I can use that cable when length is necessary to reach the rear USB 3.0 ports.

I also think the WD My Passport drive is working in good order.
The drive is fairly new and has plenty of space left - as I've only filled about +90GB out of the 1 TB (930 GB) it has.

I didn't know about transferring many file leading to slower speeds. It also seemed like transferring in bigger chunks.
Do you suggest defragging an external HDD as well?

 
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