Western Digital My Passport Pro 2TB review

The Western Digital My Passport Pro is a portable RAID array with a Thunderbolt port. Sadly, the My Passport Pro only has a Thunderbolt Port; there’s no USB port on this external hard drive, so you’ll need a computer with a Thunderbolt port if you want to use it.

The Pro isn’t designed to be user-serviceable either, so you’ll need to send it to Western Digital for servicing in the event of a disk failure. This isn’t ideal, but the My Passport Pro is at least covered by a three-year warranty. Conveniently, you can install an easy-to-use RAID configuration utility from the My Passport Pro itself.

Another caveat is that the Pro only works in RAID mode when connected to a Mac. It appears as two separate 1TB disks when connected to a Windows PC, and even then it must be formatted as exFAT. This is an annoying limitation, which we suspect is due to the use of a software RAID controller rather than a hardware controller, but it’s not a fatal flaw.

Surprisingly, the Pro is fitted with two 5.400rpm WD10SPCX disks instead of a 7,200rpm pair. In any case, there’s no need to unduly worry about cooling. A small, quiet cooling fan sits at the rear of the Pro.

We reviewed the Pro fitted with two 1TB disks, but an even more expensive version fitted with a pair of 2TB disks is also available (£367, www.ebuyer.com). When configured in RAID 0, 2TB of storage is available for use, but you’ll lose all the data on a disk if it fails). When configured as RAID 1, only 1TB of storage is available, but your data is copied across both disks so you won’t lose it if one of the disks fails.

When configured in RAID 0, large files were written at a fast 200MB/s and read at a slower but still impressive 167MB/s. Small files were written at 125MB/s and read at 152.2MB/s. RAID 1 performance was much slower. Large file performance was in line with what we’d expect from a USB3, single disk unit, with write speeds of 91.7MB/s and read speeds of 99MB/s. Small file performance was around twice the speed of a USB3 disk, though, with write speeds of 88.5MB/s and read speeds of 100MB/s. The slower RAID 1 performance is the trade-off for the extra protection.

The WD My Passport Pro is overkill for casual everyday use and it isn’t suited to cross-platform data sharing. It’s a good storage choice for professional users on a budget, but truly demanding professional users for whom no expense is spared will want an even faster Thunderbolt SSD, such as the much more expensive Elgato Thunderbolt Drive+.