#My passport ultra for mac reviews portable
For instance, a portable drive that you mainly keep in a travel or work bag won't do you much good as an automated backup destination for your home PC. How much value you get from these "value add-ons" really depends on what type of user you are.
#My passport ultra for mac reviews software
Some users will simply ignore the software features and others will embrace them. This product is the fastest non-RAID palm-sized portable HDD available. The My Passport Ultra also performs extremely well in this test. The backup directory test uses a mix of small, medium, and large files and is the equivalent of transferring your My Documents folder in Windows. That's a 50% decrease in the amount of time it takes to write the data. The game directory test uses mostly small blocks, and the My Passport Ultra has a 10 second lead over its nearest competitor and a 20-second advantage over the LaCie Porsche Design 4TB. That allows it to write at a much higher rate of speed. This tells us the DRAM buffer and cache are collecting the incoming random data and then passing it to the platters as sequential data. The My Passport Ultra, even during a 100% random write workload, doesn't make the sound or even vibrate much at all. Over the years the sound has been called many things, but "rock grinder" may be the best description. Typically, you can hear the drive working hard when you read or write small blocks of data to an HDD. The My Passport Ultra 4TB's advanced cache system helps it to outperform those two products when we add the smaller blocks in the game directory and backup directory tests. The Western Digital My Passport Ultra 4TB trails the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim 2TB and LaCie Porsche Design 4TB in the Blu-Ray ISO transfer test by 54 and 40 seconds, respectively. The Directory Test is a 15.2GB block of data that contains a mix of images, software installations, ISO files, and multimedia that yields a nice real-world workload. For the Game test, we transferred data from a game directory to the portable drives.
![my passport ultra for mac reviews my passport ultra for mac reviews](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/NQN72iuSbU2cwZoutgVbWF-1200-80.jpg)
We tested transfer performance with a Blu-ray ISO.
![my passport ultra for mac reviews my passport ultra for mac reviews](https://www.bhphotovideo.com/images/images2500x2500/wd_wdbezw0030bba_nesn_3tb_my_passport_ultra_1158736.jpg)
We often see performance measured in throughput, but t ime-based results are easier to interpret because the sense of time is universal. Most of us simply read and write large pieces of data for archiving or transferring data from one location to another. Even though it is possible, you shouldn't run an operating system on these drives. We don't run many application tests on external or portable storage products because the typical workload is sequential in nature.