Portability seems to be ever more important to creative pros, with powerful laptops such as the MacBook Pro with Retina display, HP Envy TouchSmart 15 even the ludicrously powerful Aorus X7 gaming machine all coming in at under an inch thick, and often shedding as much weight as possible.
Being thin and light often means shedding a hard drive in favor of solid-state storage. That's great for performance, but it means paying through the nose if you want a lot of space. For the MacBook Pro in particular, storage comes at a hefty premium – to get a 1TB SSD, you have to buy at least the highest-end 13-inch MacBook Pro, and then add a minimum of £400 (about $644, AU$719) to the price.
But if you're working with lots of massive files – and especially video – on the move, you often can't do without space, and sacrificing performance isn't an option.
On the desktop, RAIDs of hard drives can offer a balance between hard drive prices and SSD performance, and Western Digital is the first company to bring that to portable computing.
The My Passport Pro is a Thunderbolt drive that powers itself over a single Thunderbolt cable, and contains two 1TB hard drives. You can choose to have these arranged for performance as a striped RAID 0 array, meaning that you get to use the full 2TB of space and also get the maximum possible transfer speeds.
Alternatively, you can have them as a mirrored RAID 1 array, meaning that you sacrifice performance and can only effectively use half of the storage space, but you get safety, because every file is stored on both drives, so you don't lose anything if one fails.
Both of these options are useful to pros, so it's up to you which one is right for your use. Western Digital has included a Mac app that makes it easy to switch between the options, or to check the drive for errors and erase it.
Portability really is the key thing here. The unit is about 140mm (5.5 inches) long, 80mm (3.15 inches) wide and 27mm (1.06 inches) thick. It weighs about 460g (1.01 pounds), which isn't overly heavy, but when combined with its small size makes it feel extremely dense. Its solid aluminum exterior adds to this – it feels like a really solid unit to hold.
The Thunderbolt cable is built into the unit, and when not in use wraps all the way around the outside in a rubber groove. There's no Thunderbolt passthrough here (adding one would require an external power supply – a mains adapter – making it less portable), so if you've got a string of devices, this needs to go at the end.
There's a fan at the rear of the unit, next to where the cable attaches, along with a tiny LED to indicate power. It's the only indicator light of any kind on the unit.
Its silver and black colors reflect its premium standing, which is also of course reflected in the price. At £239 ($300, around AU$430), it's not cheap, but it's not totally unreasonable. There's also a 4TB version available, which will set you back £349 ($430, about AU$627).It's not cheap, but you get a lot of performance for your moneyThe Western Digital My Passport Pro has two RAID options, each of which is useful: striped for speed, or mirrored for security. We took benchmarks for both configurations. The figures given below are the average results after five test runs.
Striped RAID 0
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
5GB stress test
Write 204.68 MB/s
Read 204.94 MB/s
5GB stress test
Write 204.68 MB/s
Read 204.94 MB/s
QuickBench
Small files (<1MB) average
Sequential read 162.257 MB/s
Sequential write 142.61 MB/s
Random read 19.16 MB/s
Random write 41.09 MB/s
Small files (<1MB) average
Sequential read 162.257 MB/s
Sequential write 142.61 MB/s
Random read 19.16 MB/s
Random write 41.09 MB/s
Finder
2.5GB file transfer
22 seconds
2.5GB file transfer
22 seconds
Mirrored RAID 1
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
5GB stress test
Write 104.12 MB/s
Read 108.08 MB/s
5GB stress test
Write 104.12 MB/s
Read 108.08 MB/s
QuickBench
Small files (<1MB) average
Sequential read 73.225 MB/s
Sequential write 77.877 MB/s
Random read 18.406 MB/s
Random write 25.713 MB/s
Small files (<1MB) average
Sequential read 73.225 MB/s
Sequential write 77.877 MB/s
Random read 18.406 MB/s
Random write 25.713 MB/s
Finder
2.5GB file transfer
24 seconds
2.5GB file transfer
24 seconds
Our My Passport Pro sample came configured in the striped RAID 0 configuration, so that's what we started our tests with. We were impressed with the results.
Transfer speeds peaked at over 200 megabytes per second, which is superb for a portable drive, or at least one that isn't an SSD. The much lower speeds for random read/writes of small files are no surprise – it's not what hard drives are good at. But with the striped RAID 0 setting spreading the data across both drives and using as much Thunderbolt bandwidth as it can, you're looking at potentially double the data transfer speed compared to a single-drive device, such as the Freecom Mobile Drive Mg 1TB.
Blackmagic's test suite indicated that the drive should be suitable for professional, uncompressed video work up to 1080p (10-bit YUV 4:2:2, if you care about such things) and we had no problems using it as a primary drive when working.
It's true that you get better performance with SSD-based drives (typically around 300 MB/s, so a 50% increase – not insignificant) but not in anything close to this kind of price-per-gigabyte ratio. Even a single 1TB SSD will set you back as much as the 4TB version of this drive.
Set to mirrored RAID 1, it's no surprise that speeds drop to around half – you've gone from spreading the data over two drives to effectively just one, after all (technically, it's all going on the second drive since you're mirroring, but that doesn't help with the speeds).
You might have noticed that our 2.5GB single file transfer time was almost identical in both cases, though – a reminder that individual real-world situations don't always reflect what the benchmarks say.
Switching between the two RAID modes is easy using WD tools. These come loaded on the hard drive in DMG form. You can switch RAID modes, run SMART tests and erase the whole thing easily enough. There are no encryption tools as part of WD's suite, though.
In use, the drive is quiet at first, but once you start using its two drives intensely, the fan at the back kicks up a pretty notable whirr – it's high-pitched, and yes, somewhat intrusive. It'll stand out even in a busy office environment. It's understandable (the unit gets pretty warm even with the fan at full whine), but it means that if you're doing any kind of audio editing, you'd better have remembered your headphones.
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