WD My Passport Pro Portable Thunderbolt Drive
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,234 words · ~6 min read
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the CM Storm sf7 uses a massive 18 cm
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fan to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four port USB hub click now to
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learn more often I look at an external Thunderbolt drive and I can't really see
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any reason why it had to be Thunderbolt a great example of this would be a
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single drive external drive that's bottlenecked by the drive performance
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rather than an alternative less expensive interface like USB 3 another
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example would be a large multi-drive array device that I'd really rather see
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using a network solution like 10 GB Ethernet like let's get going on that
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standard huh the my passport Pro is an exception here though it has two
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internal drives that can be run independently in raid zero or in raid
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one and it legitimately benefits from Thunderbolt running in raid zero we were
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able to achieve consistent read and right speeds like sustained of about 200
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megabytes per second better than we've ever been able to achieve on usb3
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solution and because Thunderbolt is capable of outputting more power than
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USB it is also able to power up both drives without resorting to an auxiliary
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connector or wall power adapter something that will be a major advantage
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for anyone working on the go in fact it not only doesn't require a separate
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power canable that is to say a connector and a cable integrated it also doesn't
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require you to cart a Thunderbolt cable around with you the cable is integrated
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and wraps around the drive for storage there is one trick with this drive
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though our physical inspection of it reveals that our 4 TB model is extremely
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thick for an external hard drive it actually uses a fan for active Cooling
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and as we get a closer look at that cable by the way this is how it wraps up and that's about how long it takes to
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wrap it up as we get a closer look at that we see just that cable there is no
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alternative connector such as USB 3 which would have added additional cost
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and bulk to the solution the my passport Pro only works over Thunderbolt which is
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something that will be a deal breaker for many but given how focused this
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product is on Mac users of course they have Thunderbolt who are creative
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professionals I mean the drive utility program is only even available on Mac I
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doubt most people looking at this drive will even notice and anyway using dis
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part to manually delete the factory created Mac compatible partitions then
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creating our own structure gives us all the same functionality on a Thunderbolt
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equipped PC you'll just need to import the foreign Drive configuration in dis
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manager whenever you plug it into a new pc piece of cake now I mentioned
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creative professionals before and I guess that leads pretty well into the
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who is this product for segment of the video creative folks who are on the go
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this thing was practically made for us when shooting raw video footage or even
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prores sometimes we can easily fill up our dual 512 gig SSD recorder solution
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and having something that can offload very quickly using a notebook without
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needing to fuss about with power adapters or whatever else something with a lot of capacity is a huge Boon the the
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sooner we can get back to shooting the better because you've got actors and and
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helpers just sitting there when you're offloading footage EA would have been
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just as good for this and I really wish it had taken off as a standard but due
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to its specialized storage only nature non-powered standard configuration and
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fragile connector it was not meant to be so Thunderbolt will have to do the trick
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all right so far so good on the Dual Drive Pro but what about the other
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Solutions out there this is by no means the first dual external drive in fact we
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have an angel bird SSD tog go twin that's fulfilled a similar need for us
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safe fast portable storage for almost a year but there are some differences
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while it's less likely to be damaged in transit it's extremely expensive lower
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capacity and doesn't support trim so performance has actually gotten
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significantly slower since we first started using it which is something that
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can be addressed by secure erasing it but it's not always convenient when you
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got footage on it from this project than another project or whatever else there's
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also the inade CR h212 enclosure which
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is only about 50 bucks plus the cost of driv for something that's functionally
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pretty similar so it is less expensive but it only uses USB 3 so performance is
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lower it needs to be plugged into two ports for adequate power and it lacks
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the cooling solution used by the WD drive and there are also in the Amazon
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reviews also some complaints about the overall build quality of it in this one
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no complaints whatsoever so the only thing left now is the conclusion and for
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that I'll give you the rundown of how my team plans to use this raid zero in a
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portable drive is just plain stupid in my opinion yeah I ran some benchmarks
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for you before but in my mind that's only really useful from a theoretical
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standpoint The Raid one speed reality check kind of sucks when you've been
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benchmarking in raid zero but for a drive that's intended to be chucked into
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a gear bag and carried around and jostled around with other equipment no
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matter how well it's built the likelihood of failure is so much higher
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than a drive that sits in your computer tower and never gets moved that that is
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really how I would recommend actually using it that way you've got two terab
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well with the 4 terab model you've got two terabytes of overall safe storage
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that's going to be there even in the event of a hardware failure which if
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you're backing up a project for example it's going to be something that's pretty
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darn important so thank you guys very much for watching this video like it and
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always don't forget to subscribe I didn't write it in my script today and that's how Reliant I've gotten on the
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teleprompter it's a sad State of Affairs
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we should see if I can do a video blindfolded to see if I can even
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function without the teleprompter we'll just go like electricians
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tape thank you for watching this
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episode L Tech tips without me being able to see for
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the last 10 seconds of it this hurts