Western Digital My Passport Pro Review

The Western Digital My Passport Pro ($429.99) is a spacious, Thunderbolt-equipped, portable hard drive for the graphics pro. With a 4TB capacity and built-in Thunderbolt cable, it can hold all of your project files for quick access and use. There are faster drives out there, but the My Passport Pro($702.19 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) offers a very good balance of portability, speed, capacity, and price. It comes highly recommended for the graphic artist or video producer on a constant deadline.

Design and Features
The My Passport Pro has the same silver and black color scheme as the Western Digital My Passport Studio, though it’s much thicker. It’s almost two inches tall and weighs 1.56 pounds, so it pushes the definition of a pocket drive. Rather, it’s designed for semi-portable use at a worksite or cafe, after you’ve taken it out of your commute bag along with your Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window). A Thunderbolt cable is permanently attached, with a channel molded into the chassis for storage, which also means that you can’t lose it. You wrap the cable around the drive and plug it into a handy receptacle next to the cooling fan. I wish that the receptacle were a Thunderbolt pass-through port for daisy chaining, but alas, it’s empty.

The Thunderbolt cable carries the data and powers the drive, which is a simpler setup than the dual-powered Promise Pegasus J2( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window). While The Pegasus J2 is made from two SSD mechanisms, the My Passport Pro is made of two 2TB spinning hard drive mechanisms, which is why the chassis is so thick. This gives users 4TB of space in RAID level 0, 2TB in RAID level 1 (mirroring), and two separate 2TB drives in JBOD (Just a Bunch of Devices) mode.

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The My Passport Pro is formatted for HFS+ out of the box, so you can use it as a Time Machine device immediately. We think that more users will utilize the drive as a large media store, since 4TB can hold hundreds of hours of HD video. The included WD Drive utility lets you reformat the device or switch the RAID level, but you don’t necessarily have to use it if you’re simply storing data. The My Passport Pro comes with a three-year warranty.

Performance
Users buy Thunderbolt drives for their performance, and the My Passport Pro doesn’t disappoint. It managed a quick 216.8MBps read and 173MBps write throughput on our standard AJA System test. It compared well with the Pegasus J2 under bus power (295MBps read; 281MBps write) and left the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt Portable HDD (HD-PA1.0TU3) in the dust (109.7MBps read; 96MBps write).

Results were similar on the Black Magic disk test, where the My Passport Pro scored a high 211MBps read and 204.8MBps write. This is about as good as can get under bus power, since externally powered drives (i.e., those with AC adapters), like the Editors’ Choice LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2, speed past with a phenomenal 1,099.1MBps write and 1,135.2MBps read score on the Black Magic test using the faster Thunderbolt 2 interface.

The My Passport Pro is a very good value, at roughly 11 cents per gigabyte. That’s significantly better than the Buffalo Ministation, which came in at 23 cents per gigabyte. While the initial purchase price may be a little steep compared with lower-capacity drives, the My Passport Pro will take up a lot less space than two to four cheaper hard drives.

The Western Digital My Passport Pro is certainly is made for users who are willing to pay a premium because they need the extra speed and capacity to finish their projects on time and on budget. The My Passport Pro has similar performance numbers to the Pegasus J2 in bus-powered mode, but has 16 times the capacity at the same price. The My Passport has a better bang for the buck than the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2, but it is ultimately a lot slower, so the LaCie holds on to the Editors’ Choice for external desktop-class hard drives. That said, we still recommend the My Passport Pro for graphics professionals who need to carry several weeks’ worth of HD video or a library’s worth of raw photo files with them. It offers a good balance between speed and capacity.