But, unlike the inconsistent write performance we’ve seen with other SMR HDDs, WD’s My Passport writes extremely consistently. Bear in mind that results will vary based on the workload and ambient air temperature.Īs one would expect with a hard drive, WD’s My Passport doesn’t feature a write cache. data to see when (or if) thermal throttling kicks in and how it impacts performance.
When possible, we also log the temperature of the drive via the S.M.A.R.T. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This test reveals if the drive has a pseudo-SLC cache, which is a small portion of faster-programmed flash that absorbs incoming write workloads. We threw in this one last test to measure the performance of the drive over a 15-minute window, writing to the full span of the drive. Write speed and temperature are two important and inter-related metrics for external devices.