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It might not be as flashy as Thunderbolt, but USB3 is still an exciting storage technology in its own right thanks to the sheer speed it can offer. Western Digital’s latest drive, the My Passport, combines USB3 with a 2TB hard disk – one of the largest capacities we’ve seen in a portable external hard drive.
That’s a huge amount of space, but the My Passport isn’t the fastest external drive we’ve seen. It wrote large files at 90MB/s and read them at 108MB/s, which compares well to the Iomega Prestige Mobile, which ran through the same tests at 73MB/s and 115MB/s. The Western Digital faltered when working with small files, though; its write and read results of 23MB/s and 39MB/s pale in comparison to the Iomega, which ran the same tests at 62MB/s and 48MB/s.
The included software bundle isn’t as impressive, either. There’s a diagnostic tool which runs basic disk checks, a sleep timer to shut the drive down after a certain period of inactivity and a rudimentary disc erasing tool. Western Digital also offers security features, but this only amounts to password-protecting the drive. The Iomega, on the other hand, provides a one-year subscription to Trend Micro Internet Security Suite, a backup utility, a disk imager and MozyHome online backup.
Western Digital’s drive is reasonably priced at 8p per gigabyte, which is better than the Iomega Prestige Mobile‘s 11p per gigabyte, but we still prefer the Iomega drive, which is faster and has a better software bundle. Only buy the Western Digital if huge capacity is your chief concern.
