Western Digital My Passport Essential SE USB 3.0 External Hard Drive: Small on the Outside, Big on the Inside!

Testing Platform

Moving on to performance benchmarks, we used the following hardware combination in our speed test.

• Processor: Intel Core i7 920
• Motherboard: Intel X58
• Storage: 2x Patriot Inferno 100GB, configured in RAID-0 mode
• RAM: 3x 4 GB DDR3
• Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 5550

For comparison purposes, we also included scores from the Silicon Power A80 external hard drive (also with USB 3.0 interface) in the final table.

Test Results

HDTune

According to the results obtained from HD Tune benchmarking software above, Western Digital My Passport Essential SE has an average read speed of almost 70 MB/s. With that kind of transfer rate, you can even run computer games directly from it and still achieve a level of performance comparable to internal hard drives.