VERDICT:The WD 1TB drive gives a cost per GB of Rs.6.97 which was considerably higher than that offered by the 1TB ADATA Classic CH11 drive (Rs.5.05). Overall performance was good, but not better than the Classic CH11 drive. So unless the pricing comes down, we find this drive hard to recommend.
Design and Build:
The WD My Passport Essential SE drive looks identical to any other My Passport series of drives. The 2.5-inch drive is housed within a glossy black plastic cover. There is only one USB 3.0 interface port on the drive. The plastic covering does bend if pressed hard onto. There is a single status indicator that glows white when the drive is on.
Test Setup:
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K @3.4GHz
Motheboard: Intel DP67BG
RAM: 2x2GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 RAM @1333MHz (timing: 9-9-9-24)
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
OS Drive: Intel SSDSA2H080GIGN (80 GB SSD)
RAID 0 Combination: 2 x 300GB WD Velociraptor
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6850
Power Supply: Corsair HX620W
Performance:
The drive gives unformatted space of 931.48 GB. It gave a Read Burst speed of 142.9 MB/s which was slower than that of Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex which gives 184 MB/s. In the real world testing which involved transferring 4GB sequential and assorted files from the WD drive to the RAID array and back we got the following scores. Read / Write (sequential file) in MB/s – 78.11 / 52.23 and Read / Write (Assorted) in MB/s – 78.22 / 71.96. This performance was slower than the Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 1.5TB drive as well as Classic ADATA CH11 drive which scored higher in the sequential file transfer tests. It took 43.12 secs to open a 1 GB PSD file when used as a scratch disk.
Verdict:
The WD 1TB drive gives a cost per GB of Rs.6.97 which was considerably higher than that offered by the 1TB ADATA Classic CH11 drive (Rs.5.05). Overall performance was good, but not better than the Classic CH11 drive. So unless the pricing comes down, we find this drive hard to recommend.
Features: 3 / 5
Performance: 2.5/5
Build Quality:3/5
Value:2/5
Overall: 2.5/5
