At present, computer hardware is no longer synonymous with cold, big iron. Many products are designed with various technological and artistic elements, such as adding RGB lighting effects to the memory and motherboard, and some manufacturers will launch flash drives similar to the shape of the zodiac of the year. WD, a Western Digital brand, has launched the My Passport Ultra Portable Storage Hard Drive, designed specifically for the Year of the Dragon. Its appearance integrates the elements of the Chinese dragon and zodiac, using bright red as the main color, which means red and prosperous, auspicious, and different from other ordinary mobile hard disks in appearance, which is more festive and can better meet the needs of Chinese users. So does it make for a good experience? Let's go through the test to find out.
Product Specifications:
Capacity 2TB
Interface USB 32 gen 1
Warranty: 3-year limited warranty.
Dimensions 110mm x 816mm x 14mm
Weight 016kgs
Operating temperature 5 33
Storage temperature -20 65
Reference** $699.
Golden Chinese Dragon WD My Passport Ultra Portable Storage Hard Drive Year of the Dragon Special Edition Analysis
From the outside, it obviously goes without saying that although Western Digital is a foreign company, this WD My Passport Ultra portable storage hard drive is specially created for the Chinese lunar Year of the Dragon. From Chinese red to gold, the Chinese dragon is a favorite element of Chinese consumers, and a bright golden auspicious dragon on the front of the hard drive symbolizes the wealth rolling in and endless. The use of anodized metal shell not only makes it have better durability and protective layer, but also makes the product more textured and high-grade with oblique stripe texture design.
The plastic part on the back of the hard drive is made of more than 50% ** plastic.
The product is equipped with the popular USB 32 Gen 1 Type-C interface.
It comes with a SuperSpeed USB-C to USB-C cable with a bandwidth of 5Gbps, as well as a USB-C to USB-A adapter.
In addition to the atmospheric appearance, WD has also designed this product with an eco-friendly mindset. The plastic part of the hard disk shell is made of more than 50% plastic, and the packaging carton of the product is also completely acceptable. At the same time, this product is equipped with the popular USB 32 Gen 1 Type-C port, and comes with a SuperSpeed USB-C to USB-C cable with 5Gbps bandwidth, and a USB-C to USB-A adapter, allowing the product to be connected to a variety of USB ports and compatible with Windows and macOS operating systems.
Inside the hard drive, a 25-inch Western Digital HDD.
WD Drive Utilities can inspect, test, and turn off or on the read/write status LEDs on the hard drive housing.
Embedded inside the hard disk is a 2TB mechanical hard disk with the model number "WD20JDRM-11CFES1", which is a 25-inch Western Digital HDD. Of course, whether it is 4800 rpm or 5400 rpm, there are not too many technical highlights of the mechanical hard disk, as far as this product is concerned, the most important thing is that the WD My Passport Ultra portable storage hard disk Year of the Dragon Special Edition can use WD Drive Utilities (hard disk tool), WD Security (security settings), backup (backup) and other free professional tools to enhance the user's experience. Among them, WD Drive Utilities can check the usage status of the hard disk, test the hard disk, specify the sleep time of the hard disk, and turn on or off the LED read and write status display on the hard disk housing.
Through the WD Security software, users can set a password to access the hard drive.
With the included Arconis True Image software, users can choose from a variety of backup sources.
With Arconis True Image software, users can choose from a variety of backup options to back up their data.
At the same time, the WD My Passport Ultra portable storage hard drive also supports 256-bit AES hardware encryption, and through the WD Security software, users can set a password to access the hard drive, so as to avoid data leakage once the hard drive is lost. The backup function of the hard drive is based on the Arconis True Image software, which allows users to back up the data on the computer to the WD My Passport Ultra portable storage drive in a variety of ways. If you choose a full backup, every time you run the backup software, the hard disk will back up all the data in **; If incremental backup is selected, the hard disk will only back up all files that have changed since the last backup; Differential backup is a backup that replicates all changed data since the last full backup. At the same time, users can also set the time and frequency of backup. In short, with the support of supporting software, the WD My Passport Ultra portable storage hard drive has become a professional small database.
The WD My Passport Ultra Portable Storage Drive is backed by a three-year warranty and is available in a capacity of only 2TB.
In addition, WD also offers a 3-year limited warranty on the WD My Passport Ultra Portable Storage Drive for the Year of the Dragon Special Edition, but this product is only available in a 2TB capacity. This time, we tested it on a platform based on AMD Ryzen 7 8700G processor, B650E motherboard, 32GB DDR5 6400 memory, and Radeon RX 7900XTX.
Test platform. Motherboard: GIGABYTE B650E Ice Sculpture X motherboard.
Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 8700G
Memory: G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo RGB DDR5 6400 32GB Memory Set.
Hard disks: YMTC PC411 commercial consumer SSD, WD My Passport Ultra portable storage hard drive Year of the Dragon Special Edition.
Graphics: Radeon RX 7900XTX
Power supply: GIGABYTE Magic Eagle 1300PG5 power supply.
Operating system: Windows 11
Reach the level of mainstream mobile hard disks and benchmark performance tests
First of all, from the benchmark test, the performance of the WD My Passport Ultra portable storage hard drive in the Year of the Dragon Special Edition is not much different from other mainstream mechanical mobile hard drives, with a maximum sequential read and write speed of 11668mb/s、110.39MB s, and in the Atto Disk benchmark, it also achieved a maximum sequential read and write speed of 10802mb/s、102.52mb/s。In terms of random 4K performance, similar to other mechanical hard disks, its performance is average, and there is a big gap with SSD. Of course, the specific performance still needs to be verified by practical application, and then we used the YMTC PC411 commercial consumer SSD and the WD My Passport Ultra portable storage hard drive Year of the Dragon Special Edition for file transfer testing.
From a single mass file to a game file, ** file
File transfer performance test
We tested the transfer performance of the drive using three types of files, which are each with a capacity of up to 32ISO file of 9GB; Consists of 2720 files with a total capacity of 334GB CS2 game installation file; Consists of 1720 sheets** with a total capacity of 187GB of ** file. First in the transmission 32At a 9GB ISO file, the read and write speeds were comparable to the benchmark, reaching 1115mb/s、109.4mb/s。After all, ISO files are also sequential data files, so they can get faster transfer speeds. When transferring CS2 game installation files, which are made up of many small files, the WD My Passport Ultra portable storage hard drive for the Year of the Dragon Special Edition can achieve a read and write speed of 89 respectively1mb/s、91.4mb s, which is not much lower than the transfer speed of a single large file.
Even when transferring a smaller average size of a single file, the transfer speed of the hard drive does not drop too much.
And the average size of a single file is smaller at 18In the 7GB** file transfer test, the transfer speed of the hard disk will decrease further, but not by much, and its **read and write speeds will be 846mb/s、70.5mb/s。It can be said that in terms of actual file transfer, the performance of the WD My Passport Ultra portable storage hard drive in the Year of the Dragon Special Edition is acceptable, although it is not as good as a mobile SSD, but whether it is reading and writing a single large-capacity file, or a large number of small files, it can complete the file transfer faster, no matter what type of file is transferred, its speed will not be greatly reduced.
It can also be used in the game if necessary
The WD My Passport Ultra Portable Storage Drive Year of the Dragon Special Edition Final Fantasy 14: The End of the Dawn Moon took a total of 39 scenes to load671s
We also did an interesting test to see how the HDD-based removable storage device would perform when launching the game. We are in 2The benchmark for Final Fantasy 14: Dawn Moon's End was run at 5K resolution and max quality, and in addition to the game's number of frames, it also measured the total time it took for the SSD to load five game scenes, as well as the time it took to load each scene. First of all, from the perspective of the total time spent, its 39The 671s do take a lot more time to load than SSDs, but it's not that bad to look at in each scenario.
As shown in the transcript, the maximum load time for a single scene is 13383s with a minimum load time of 3339s。In the actual game, players often load a scene and play it for a long time, and complete all the tasks of the level before entering the next scene, so as long as the loading time of each scene is not particularly long, such as up to a few minutes, it will not seriously affect the experience. So if your computer runs out of storage space, you can also use the WD My Passport Ultra Portable Storage Drive for the Year of the Dragon Special Edition.
The temperature is not high after 6 hours of continuous writing
After up to 6 hours of full-disk write testing, the WD My Passport Ultra Portable Storage Drive Year of the Dragon Special Edition has a maximum surface temperature of only 393℃
Finally, we also pass HD Tune Pro 575 full-disk write test to verify the heating and stability of the WD My Passport Ultra portable storage hard drive in the Year of the Dragon Special Edition, and in the full-disk write test for up to 6 hours, the temperature rise of the HDD after continuous operation was not serious, the software detected the maximum internal temperature of 42, and the temperature value observed from the FLIR thermal imager was also relatively close, and the maximum temperature on the surface of the case was only 393. The average temperature of the surface of the hard disk enclosure is 346. There is only a warm feeling when touched by hand, and the calorific value is not high.
A special edition storage product that can be given away or used for personal use
After the above experience, we believe that the WD My Passport Ultra Portable Storage Hard Drive Year of the Dragon Special Edition is not a traditional product that focuses on performance, its biggest selling point is the special design of the Year of the Dragon, coupled with rich storage and backup functions, a complete range of accessories, domineering but without losing the traditional style makes it very suitable for giving to friends and relatives or for personal use, after all, in those applications that do not require high performance, it is also fully competent, such as used as a movie disc, ** disc, Office document disks and so on. The biggest significance of the WD My Passport Ultra Portable Storage Hard Drive Year of the Dragon Special Edition is that it gives a new direction to the design of portable hard drives, brings new inspiration, and can better meet the needs of Chinese users. We also hope that WD will stick to this idea and continue to create surprises with innovative Zodiac series storage products every year in the future.