by Andrey Kuznetcov
04/06/2005 | 04:38 PM
Not so long ago there appeared a new compact storage solution based on a hard disk drive. It came from a well-known HDD developer Western Digital. The solution was officially announced on November 9, 2004, but it got into our lab only in the beginning of this year, and we immediately tested it, of course.
Please welcome a new external USB portable hard disk drive from WD!
Of course, the starting point for the external hard disk drive solution development was the release of the WD Scorpio HDD of the 2.5” form-factor (for more details see our article called Western Digital Scorpio 2.5” HDD: Better Late Than Never).
And we would like to start our story about WD Passport from its exterior appearance. It looks like there can hardly be anything new invented in terms of the exterior case design already, but Western Digital managed to suggest something pretty original nevertheless. By rounding the corners and sides of the silver HDD case and designing the bottom part of the case from dark-blue gummy plastic material, the developers managed to achieve several goals at a time. They created an elegant case with attractive color design, managed to make it sit highly stably on any working surfaces, and at the same time reduced the level of vibrations and noise generated during work. The hard drive is relatively small in size and will easily fit into your coat or jacket pocket, thus you will have it on you any time. But to be fair we should still point out that the case of WD Passport is anyway larger than that of a Transcend or ZIV drives.
There are a USB port and a power connector on one of the sides. The latter can be used on those rare occasions when the devices lacks power fed along the USB interface for stable operation.
There are three drive models in the Passport family: 40GB (our today’s hero), 60GB and 80GB. The technical characteristics of the drives are determined by the specifications of WD Scorpio HDDs used inside them (for more details see our article called Western Digital Scorpio 2.5” HDD: Better Late Than Never). The spindle rotation speed of the drive is 5,400rpm. The drive features a 2MB buffer and boasts 12ms average seek time and 5.5ms average sector latency is 5.5ms. Besides that the drive provides track-to-track seek time of 2s and supports USB 2.0 interface.
This is not a very big solution, as we have already said. Its size is 21.1x144.3x89.1mm. The solution also supports WD’s brand name data Life Guard technology, which is intended to ensure higher security of the data stored on this drive. Besides, it also supports special power-saving technology, which should extend the battery life of the notebook, if the drive is connected to it.
As for the package, the device goes with a USB cable and a brief installation manual.
The approximate retail price of the device is around $170 for a 40GB model.
We used the following software during our test session:
We ran all benchmarks on the following test platform:
For our tests we connected the drive to a USB 2.0 port on the mainboard and formatted it for NTFS file system with the cluster of default size and for FAT32 file system with a 32KB cluster.
Unfortunately, we haven’t got any statistics for the portable drives with 40GB storage capacity. The only results we have are those for Lacie Mobile Hard Drive. To tell the truth, this comparison will not be quite correct, because Lacie uses a 4,200rpm disk drive for its solution. But on the other hand, the Lacie drive supports more efficient IEEE1394a (FireWire) interface. So, it is still a question, which of the two is going to win this race.
Let’s find it out now.
The low-level Intel IOMeter benchmark was used to test the linear read and write speed of the drive. During the test session there is a stream of read/write requests sent to the drive with the queue depth=4. The data block size changes every minute. As a result we can see the dependence of the linear read/write speed on the data block size.
You can see very clearly on the diagram that Passport drive is falling behind its opponent quite noticeably throughout the entire test. This lag is the biggest when the drive works with small data blocks.
On the next graph you see the results obtained for liner write speed. Again we see that WD Passport falls behind Lacie solution all the time, independent of the data block size. Both drives demonstrate the closest results when the data block size varies from 64 to 1024KB.
Among the results obtained in the classical WinBench 99 testing package, we suggest taking a look at the internal data transfer graph first:
The graph for the disk read speed from the surface looks somewhat unusual. The line on the graph goes a little bit up in the middle of the disk space, while the results in the beginning and in the end are not very diverse. All in all, I would say that the read speed turned out not very high.
At least it is significantly lower than the linear read speed demonstrated by the ATA model of WD Scorpio drive.
Judging by the linear read graph for WD Passport, we dare suppose that it performed relatively slowly here because of the low speed of the IDE-USB bridge used in it.
Let’s take a look at the performance of WD Passport in WinMark test. We will start with NTFS file system. The diagram above shows that the external drive from Western Digital has a slight performance advantage over the opponent. The same is true for Business Disk and High-End WinMark tests.
When we switch to FAT32 file system, the situation changes to just the opposite. Now the fastest one is the Mobile hard Drive, which outpaces Passport from WD in all aspects.
At the data transfer rate diagram for the beginning and the end of the disk drive we see WD Passport yield to Lacie in the read speed in the beginning of the logical disk drive (we have already described the reasons for this performance difference). However, it gets ahead of the competitor when it comes to read speed in the end of the logical drive.
The access time diagram shows that the solution from Western Digital is an indisputable winner here. This is a pretty logical situation, actually, keeping in mind that the spindle rotation speed of the Passport drive is 5,400rpm against 4,200rpm by the competitor.
FC-test is our best tool for evaluation of the real practical performance of our testing participants. The credible performance measurements are guaranteed by the working principles of this software we developed for HDD testing. The main idea of FC-Test is to measure the time the hard disk drives need to create (write), read and copy file sets, which differ from one another by the type, size and number of files. Then we calculate the practical performance of the drive basing on the time measurements.
As you remember from our previous HDD reviews, Windows and Programs patterns include a large number of smaller files, and the remaining three patterns – ISO, MP3 and Install – work with a limited number of larger files. For copy operations each drive is formatted into two 20GB equal logical partitions. The patterns are copied either within the same partition or from one partition to another.
At first we will consider the results obtained in NTFS file system. The first diagram shows how much times its takes to create (write) files on the drive. Here the results of both testing participants are kind of close, with Lacie being just a tiny bit ahead.
File reading is not the best task for WD Passport: it is falling behind the opponent in all patterns.
Copy near, i.e. when the files are copied within the same logical partition, the solution from Western Digital dashes ahead. This victory is indisputable in all patterns, and especially in ISO.
The situation is very similar to what we have just seen on the previous diagram. WD Passport is again ahead of the rival.
Now it is high time we checked out the performance of WD’s new solution in FAT32 file system. The first diagram shows how fast the files can actually be created. The external Passport drive is faster than the solution from Lacie in two patterns out of five: it copes much better with large files.
The read speeds again push Lacie drive to the winner’s pedestal It defeats the opponent in all five patterns.
When the drives copy files within the same logical partition, WD Passport is undoubtedly the fastest. It got far ahead of the rival in all five patterns.
The last diagram again indicates the indisputable triumph of the Western Digital solution. It wins a convincing victory in all five patterns.
The external portable solution from Western Digital aka Passport is a very logical occasion for this market. In fact, we would expect it to happen right after mass production of Scorpio drives had started. To be fair, we would like to stress from the very beginning that this drive didn’t surprise us with any superior speeds. The results of our test session showed that it yields in many performance aspects to the competitor, external hard drive from Lacie with even lower spindle rotation speed. It looks like NTFS file system would be a better choice for WD Passport drive, and it demonstrated its best performance during file copy tests, which seems to be caused by its lower access time.
Nevertheless, the design and construction of WD Passport left the most favorable impression. It will be very convenient for transportation of large data packs. And finally, one more competitive solution in this market segment gives us, users, some hope that the prices will go down and these solutions become even more affordable for potential buyers.