Test Western Digital My Book
Yves Pottenburgh
My typical photography workflow when traveling revolves around a laptop computer and various attached hard drives or SSDs. The prospect of leaving all that at home, and traveling only with the My Passport Wireless Pro and an iPad was enticing, so I decided to put it through a real world test.
Thanks for a very useful review of the latest iteration of this device. I have the original one and have used it extensively for travel and now never take a laptop. A 6 inch phone and a Passport Wireless and I'm good to go. And with LR Mobile, Snapseed and probably others, RAW is supported.
I did all my testing on a Mac, however according to the manual and the people I've talked with at WD it should act exactly the same on Windows. Here are the two possible scenarios for connecting if you're 'off the grid' and have no other network present:
Seriously though, I have not tried but the Samba server should be able to do direct copy (not sending the data off the device via WiFi and back) if you move/copy a file from the main "Storage" share to the mounted USB device via CIFS - I would test but at the moment my drives are plugged into different things at work.
@Paul - thanks for sharing your experience. We limited the scope of this review to core functions that we thought photographers would care most about, which is why we didn't spend a lot of time testing things like the Plex media server for watching movies.
Paul, part of the reason we focused on the Raw editing aspect of the product is because when WD briefed us they emphasized this exact feature. That was part of the value proposition of the device -- you could leave your laptop at home and still be able to access Raw files on your iPad by doing something like transferring them to Creative Cloud and editing in Lightroom Mobile on the iPad instead. So yes, that is the workflow we tested.
Can you give me an idea of what type of problems you ran into backing up SD cards? As with any product I ran into occasional glitches here or there, but one thing the Passport did consistently well during my testing was backing up SD cards in a reliable, organized manner. Also, I never noticed any difference in how the device treated Raw files vs. other things while backing up. As far as I can tell, it's completely agnostic as to what's on the cards - it just backs up the contents. (How the My Cloud app handles Raw files is a different matter, of course.)
I bought one of these the other month for a family holiday to the french alps - wanted a way of backing up my SD cards from my camera, but also being able to access images for upload to social media. My laptop is a heavy beast, but taking the iPad this worked out great.
The cards backed up automatically to the HDD, and the transfer times were quick. I was able to either upload Jpegs direct, or edit in lightroom where necessary. In addition it provided a convenient space for storing digital copies of movies that we streamed via a Kindle Fire stick to the TV in the chalet.
It also acts as a powerbank and was capable of charging the mobile phone a couple of times when I was out and it was running low.
Definitely an improvement over the first generation and part of my travel pack now.
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Hi, try running a test with DLG for a second opinion. If the test fails again, then I will recommend you to replace the hard drive. Check the links below for the steps to run a test with DLG and for the replacement options that we have.
The drive found 1 bad sectors during its self test.
There are 1 weak sectors found on the disk surface. They may be remapped any time in the later use of the disk.
At this point, warranty replacement of the disk is not yet possible, only if the health drops further.
It is recommended to examine the log of the disk regularly. All new problems found will be logged there.
No actions needed.
Letting algorithms take over the production line seemed risky. So, the company decided to start by tackling testing processes, an operation that takes place only after manufacturing and assembly are complete.
Enterprise hard drives are where the ginormous data of the digital economy lives (think search engines, social apps, and the massive data of cloud-based services). Cloud giants maintain so much data that they buy hard drives in the thousands, tens of thousands, and some even hundreds of thousands.
Peter Pang knows every crevice in the belly of the HDD test slot beast. As the director of automation and test systems engineering at Western Digital, his team of engineers is responsible for everything from developing the test routines to working with hundreds of technicians to keep systems running.
He also knew that the daily maintenance of these testers was labor-intensive and slowing things down. Whenever a slot would shut down due to a failure, a technician would frequently need to grab a 12-foot ladder, climb up, remove the slot, and take it to a lab to investigate the issue.
The three folders are copied using the Windows Copy command (the cache remains enabled). The practical test of November 23, 2021 shows the performance for simultaneous write and read operations. The lower the duration, the better the performance.
The benchmark test was performed on November 23, 2021.
Information about the test system can be found at the bottom of the home page.
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You can still use Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows, but it's no longer supported since Western Digital Dashboard has taken its place. The last version that was released is still accessible through that link; it tests WD internal and external drives, and runs on Windows 10 through Windows XP.
Our test environment consisted of six MinIO object storage servers connected to one OpenFlex Data24 through a Mellanox Sn2700 fabric switch. Both the switch and servers were configured following the Western Digital Lossless Best Practice Guide (available from Western Digital sales). The latest release of MinIO (2022-02-14) was installed and configured following standard setup procedures plus additional per server configuration to enable lossless networking and connect to OpenFlex Data24 devices on boot prior to MinIO services starting.
This testing maxed out the 8 SSD drives per server. A single SSD drive was capable of 1.07 GB/sec throughput. With 8 SSD drives assigned to each MinIO node, we could expect a maximum of 8.6GB/sec throughput per node for a total throughput of 51.60 GB/sec.
Download the full report, OpenFlex Data24 and MinIO Object Storage Solution Test Report, for more details, including specific steps for you to replicate these tests on your own hardware or cloud instances.
If you want to discuss the results in detail or ask questions about benchmarking your environment, please join us on slack or email us at he...@min.io.
When we created the RAID6 array, we used the argument -b none, to keep it from attempting to perform a bitmap scan to do faster rebuilds when using a disk that had previously been in the array. And we formatted it using the ext4 filesystem, with arguments -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0 so that background processes wouldn't contaminate our tests with drive activity that normal users wouldn't usually contend with.
Once again, at first glance, the WD Red passes muster. In terms of throughput, the Red is only 16.7 percent slower than its non-SMR Ironwolf competition. Even retesting it a second time, when the firmware has a harder job dealing with already-full zones, doesn't change the picture significantly.
On Windows systems, Data LifeGuard Diagnostics for Windows can test hard drives of all brand. You can know the basic information of the hard drive, including model, serial number, capacity, SMART status, drive letter, file system, etc.
With this tool, you can not only test the speed of the hard drive, but also check the health of the hard drive. If there are problems like bad sectors and file fragments on the hard disk, you can solve them in time and speed the hard drive up.
How to test Western Digital hard drive? In this tutorial, we shared some methods to test your WD hard drive, and provided several solutions when there're some problems. If you want to manage your disk more effectively, the AOMEI can be your first choice.
The mixed random I/O benchmark starts with a pure read test and gradually increases the proportion of writes, finishing with pure writes. The queue depth is 3 for the entire test and each subtest lasts for 3 minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. As with the pure random write test, this test is restricted to a 16GB span of the drive, which is empty save for the 16GB test file.
The WD Blue starts the mixed random I/O test with a pretty good random read speed, but performance declines as writes are added to the mix until near the end of the test, where the jump in the last segment of the test is not as large as what most drives experience.
The mixed sequential access test covers the entire span of the drive and uses a queue depth of one. It starts with a pure read test and gradually increases the proportion of writes, finishing with pure writes. Each subtest lasts for 3 minutes, for a total test duration of 18 minutes. The drive is filled before the test starts.
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