64 of 70 people found the following review helpful

Amazing but..., 11 Aug 2012

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This review is from: WD My Passport 2TB Portable Hard Drive - Black (Accessory)

I purchased two of these 2TB USB3 disks and they are great. I am pleased the activity LED is now super bright. Sadly the supplied USB cable is a bit mean... about 50cms long. All in all, I'm happy.

But...

I did a full format (six hours!) and was disappointed to see the initial 120 Mb/sec (fantastic) drop to about 90 Mb/sec when half way through and end up at 58 Mb/sec at the end.

I have now researched this characteristic and it appears common to all little disk drives. As the disk fills up, so the disk throughput slows down. This is because the speed of the data passing under the read/write heads is slower as you move nearer the centre of the disk.

Initial Acronis backups of my SSD confirm the disk is both reading and writing at about 100 Mb/sec... but the disk is still 75% empty!

So... don't buy this disk on the basis of some 'expert' review who says he/she measured 120 Mb/sec. Buy this disk because it averages 86 Mb/sec, is physically small, has a 2Tb (unformatted) capacity, is USB powered, is made a respectable company and costs only �120 + VAT.

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WD My Passport 2TB Portable Hard Drive - Black B007IA3S22 Western Digital WD My Passport 2TB Portable Hard Drive - Black Welcome Amazing but... I purchased two of these 2TB USB3 disks and they are great. I am pleased the activity LED is now super bright. Sadly the supplied USB cable is a bit mean... about 50cms long. All in all, I'm happy.

But...

I did a full format (six hours!) and was disappointed to see the initial 120 Mb/sec (fantastic) drop to about 90 Mb/sec when half way through and end up at 58 Mb/sec at the end.

I have now researched this characteristic and it appears common to all little disk drives. As the disk fills up, so the disk throughput slows down. This is because the speed of the data passing under the read/write heads is slower as you move nearer the centre of the disk.

Initial Acronis backups of my SSD confirm the disk is both reading and writing at about 100 Mb/sec... but the disk is still 75% empty!

So... don't buy this disk on the basis of some 'expert' review who says he/she measured 120 Mb/sec. Buy this disk because it averages 86 Mb/sec, is physically small, has a 2Tb (unformatted) capacity, is USB powered, is made a respectable company and costs only �120 + VAT. Balvine 11 Aug 2012

Overall: 5

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Showing 1-3 of 3 posts in this discussion

Initial post: 24 Sep 2012 23:34:27 BDT

D. Baxter says:

A reply on your speed comment; if you sequentially writing to the disc, then it will slow down as it gets towards the end of the disc. This is common to most spinning hard discs (enterprise level SCSI / SAS discs are the exception to that rule). If you are filling the drive up from day to day use then it will slow down as its contents become fragmented AND as it reaches its capacity, due to it being slower at the end of the disc anyway. SSDs are a whole other ball game, but that's not for this conversation. :)

One question - are you connecting the drive to a USB2 or USB3 port on your computer? (120Mb/sec is pretty darn fast for a 2.5" disc regardless).

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In reply to an earlier post on 25 Sep 2012 01:45:29 BDT

Balvine says:

I am using USB3 on Intel 2500K based systems running standard settings (aka no overclocking), 4GB of memory with W7 64bit. The Motherboard is a standard Gigabyte... but I can't remember the model number.

While I agree with your comments about disks in general 'slowing down' with the passing of time, I was surprised to observe more than 50% reduction in performance while doing an initial full format of the disks.

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Posted on 28 Mar 2013 05:54:04 GMT

Duncan Beesley says:

I think the cable is short so it's quicker and more stable. I heard the longer the cable between PC and HDD the greater the chance of slowdown or problems. Could be an old wives tale but that's what I heard.

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