The WD My Passport Essential USB 3.0 500GB bears more than a passing resemblance to the Buffalo MiniStation Lite, save for being about a centimetre shorter and thus slightly more compact. The drive automatically mounts with the option to install the WD SmartWare suite of backup and drive management utilities, although this isn’t a compulsory step. Despite being USB 3.0 compatible, we managed a significantly lower average read speed on the drive compared to both the Buffalo MiniStation Lite and Seagate GoFlex USB 3.0 drives. The two other drives averaged around 68MB/s read speed, where the Passport only hit an average of 54.8MB/s. The same slower speeds were evident in our write tests, where the My Passport Essential hit an average write rate of 24.1MB/s. That’s still faster than USB 2.0, naturally enough. Running the same write test on the drive connected to a USB 2.0 port gave write speeds of 18MB/s. There’s a glut of portable USB 3.0 drives on the market right now and while the My Passport Essential can’t be said to be truly slow, it’s markedly slower than the competition at this point, making it a less attractive proposition at a technical level. That beingsaid, it’s somewhat cheaper than many other USB 3.0 drives at the moment and if that price saving and the slightly smaller size appeal, it may be worth considering.
