Real World WD My Passport IOS Speed Test

Hi, I'm Mike. Welcome to my Waffle Square, where I obsess about things and you get to benefit from it. In this video I'm going to take a look at the speed differences between the WD My Passport hard drive and the WD My Passport solid state drive. We're going to take a look at real world download and upload speeds to the iPad and find out if from a performance standpoint the solid state drive is really worth the extra money. So let's quickly talk specifics about our two competitors. The hard drive version of the My Passport that we'll be using is the 4 terabyte drive that only costs $200. It's a significant value and we're comparing that against the 500 gigabyte version that's $300. So that is one eighth the storage space for one and a half times the cost. It really better outperform to an amazing extent to be worth it. Let's find out. All right, quick backstory how I got into this Waffle Square. So after a year of using the Canon 6D Mark II I finally upgraded to the EOS R primarily for its better codec and higher bit rate when recording 1080p and the 4k which 6D Mark II does not have. I don't mind the crop so much on it because I can just push the camera back further. I found with the 6D Mark II when I got the camera up too close anyway my face started to distort and I really didn't like that. So I don't mind pushing the camera back a little further for that 1.6 crop. I was really excited to have better image quality for my videos and then I realized that the EOS R when paired with the iPad brings a whole new set of issues that have to be dealt with. First and foremost the EOS R raw files are not recognized when loaded directly onto the iPad in the photos app. Instead you have to use compressed raw for them to even be recognizable. Now you can go straight into Lightroom and circumvent photos but it's a lot easier for me to just look through the photos app see which ones are worth editing in Lightroom rather than the other way around. Secondly when it comes to video the 4k video of the Canon EOS R is not recognized by the 2017 iPad Pro that I'm As you can see here it comes up as a red exclamation point when you try to upload 4k video. The 1080 uploads fine but it kind of defeats the purpose of why I upgraded to the EOS R from the 6D Mark II. Now in the camera's defense the Kodak has a really high megabits per second bit rate in 4k which was the reason I ultimately chose it over the Nikon Z6 which I rented and really loved. Thankfully I'm using LumaFusion on my iPad to edit my videos and therefore I can use alternate means to import the videos onto the iPad. Namely cloud-based drives as well as physical drives such as the Western Digital My Passport series and the GNARBOX. Now this is the first video in a two-part series where I'm going to look at first the two Western Digital drives to see if there's much of a difference and then I'm going to compare those drives to the GNARBOX 2.0 when it comes out later this month. Alright that's enough explanation of why I've tortured myself into this waffle square. Let's get on to the test. Here I have the original My Passport Wireless Pro that has the hard drive in it that is the actual spinning hard drive. If I press here you can see it's fully charged and it's up and running. Now the SD card that you saw earlier has those two files on it. They are each one minute long. One minute in 4k and one minute in 1080p for a total of 4.26 gigabytes. Let's first test the speed with which the older internal hard drive or HHD uploads. Ready? This indicator light right here blinks as it begins to download. When we get to the fourth one and it's solid then we know we're done. And there it is. Alright so two minutes 34 seconds to download 4.26 gigabytes of data. Alright same test, same card, except this time with the SSD version, the solid state drive version which is the latest for the My Passport. Now because it's a solid state drive you should absolutely expect this one to download the SD card faster. In we go, start, and done. Alright that is way faster. Remember it was two minutes 34 seconds for the hard drive version. The solid state is more than double the speed of download. Alright now on to the real test. How fast do they load from the drive into the iPad to be used with LumaFusion? Now they're supposed to be so blazing fast. I got my fire retardant shirt on here. Let's see what we got. Alright we are linked as you can see right here in the settings. We are linked to the 5 gigahertz which is the fastest Wi-Fi signal that the My Passport sends out. Let's switch over here to LumaFusion. I have a brand new clean project started. We are selected into the source menu for the Western Digital My Passport. Let's click into here, go to storage, and we downloaded that to SD card imports. And here's something that takes a long time which is getting all the way through all of these files, these folders, until you get to your media sources. That is something that's different with the GNARBOX 2.0. They are now talking about folder flattening or something like that where they take out all those separate folders and they get you right to your media much quicker. That might be nice for workflow. Alright here's our two files. Now let's start first with the 4k one which should be right here. And as you can see they don't even have the image loaded up yet to LumaFusion on what we're downloading. But if you click on it, there we go. Now normally you could take this little area here and you can wash through the video a bit. It's kind of slow with the My Passport, but let's, since we're just doing a timing test, all I want to do is take this whole one minute file and plop it onto LumaFusion. So let's get my finger on the start and my finger on the drop, and boop! It's starting its download process. We're starting the timer. As you can see right here, it is showing the progress of this video clip. And when you see these lines in LumaFusion, that means that media is not yet usable. It's just blanked out and there's all these diagonal lines through it. Once you get this spot right here all the way loaded up into a full opaque circle, then you know you've got your media. It will also show up here as solid blue and it'll show up here as the actual image. So let's see how long this takes using the 5G Wi-Fi. And time! All right, 7 minutes 36 seconds to download one minute of 4k video from the Canon EOS R. Now LumaFusion is awesome with this little information button right here. If you look, you can see that this was recorded at 466 megabits per second. So that is a massive amount of data. But nonetheless, that's why you buy the EOS R. If you're going to shoot 4k video, it's for these high bit rates like this. This is more than double the Nikon Z6. I think it was even a little lower than double. So this setup right here is just unworkable. This reminds me of the old days when we had dial-up internet and you used to go and fire up AOL and you would hit connect and then you would walk away and make dinner and then come back and you were connected. It's almost that bad. All right, because I obsess over things, I wasn't about to let it go at just transferring data through Wi-Fi connection. So I did a test and got much better results when I hooked up the supplied cord that comes. This is for charging and data transfer. This is a USB connection coming into a USB and lightning adapter for the iPad. Now since the both my passports have their own power supply internally, you do not need to connect power here to power up the data source. All right, so that's running. I've got a brand new project set up with no media on it. I cleared out all the cached media in LumaFusion, so this should be a brand new download. So let's bring it up and let's try transferring it over this time. Ready and go and stop. So that's almost as bad. We're a little less than 20 seconds of difference, so still not a workaround. All right, so now let's switch over to the SSD version. This is the 1 minute of 4k. It's 3.53 gigabytes and remember it's 466 megabits per second. So let's drop the whole thing down and start our timer. And done. All right, so that is a little more than a minute and 30 seconds faster. And if we go in here and we check the information, we'll see that it's the same file. Nothing's changed, so significantly faster than the HHD version. All right, now let's try the cabled version with the lightning connector into the iPad and see if there's any difference there. Again, I cleared out the cache. I deleted the old project and started a new one, just like every time. We'll hit download and go and time. So really only about, what, five seconds of difference. Not a noticeable difference when you use the cable with the SSD version. All right, now what if you're saying, well, Mike, that's why I don't use 4k. I use 1080. Well, let's see what one minute shot in 1080p takes in this, our fastest configuration. And, and stop. All right, so as you can see, a lot faster. Basically one minute of download time per one minute of 1080p. Now this 1080p is no slouch. If you look here, it's pretty much 90 megabits per second. That's approaching some of the other cameras, 4k megabits per second. So it's still a pretty beefy codec. All right, so you might be saying to yourself, well, that's an inefficient way to load media onto LumaFusion because you can scrub through it and just pick the piece that you want. Very true. So let's take a look at a piece that has not been downloaded yet. This is a fresh project. I've cleared all the cache media out. So it is just looking at it through the tethered line, or maybe just through the wifi. But when you want to go through and check what you want to see, you can see here, because it's playing such a big file, it's just stuttering through it. And so the whole thing is in slow motion, which makes it really impossible to select just the correct spot to jump in on. If you touch it and you drag it, it's also very choppy. But if you can kind of remember what you wanted, then you can just select that bit and say, yeah, it was about four or five seconds. So let's make it safe. Make it seven seconds right there where she had this great move. And then you can drop that in. But even for seven seconds, you're still going through this really long process, and it's it's not simple to scrub through. All right, to conclude our test, I first bring you my fourth outfit of this video. D-I-V-A. Geek Dad, you're kind of a diva. And surprisingly mediocre results for the solid state drive. Now, it was hands down the winner when it came to downloading the same amount of video. But when it came to transferring the video from the drive to LumaFusion, it really didn't perform that much better. When you consider the hard drive version, it took seven minutes, 36 seconds. The solid state drive got it done in four and five minutes, 49 seconds. That's basically 1.8 minutes faster or 24% faster. That sounds pretty good, but let's stop and consider what we're talking about. We're talking one minute of 4K video, 3.5 gigabytes. And it took this drive over a minute a gigabyte to load it onto the iPad. Now, it's possible that it's just the limitations of the 2017 iPad I was using. But nonetheless, that's what I have, and that's what I'm using to compare. And when you look at it for the cost of this drive as compared to its much less expensive hard drive version, it's really hard for me to justify it. And I'm going to send it back. So, I have so much priceless video now stored on this four terabyte drive that I need to start taking care of it. And by that, I mean not taking it onto trips, airplanes, in my backpack, bumping around in a car, out in the field to download my media. And that's why I'm looking forward to the next video when I do a comparison with the GNARBOX 2.0. Now, that is significantly more expensive than the solid state version of the Western Digital. However, there's a lot of features on there that I'm looking forward to testing. Those being folder flattening, where you won't have to go through so many steps to get to your footage, and transcoding, where it's going to make a lower quality copy of that video that will be much easier to scrub through in LumaFusion. And then you only have to download the exact parts of the 4K video you want. But in truth, the most important thing to me is going to be how quickly it loads onto LumaFusion 4K video. And that'll certainly be the biggest part of the next video. So if you found this video helpful, will you please give it a thumbs up? It really helps the YouTube algorithm to start suggesting it to more people like you. Also, I'd love to hear your comments below. Do you have any suggestions for me to get uploaded faster onto the iPad? Was I doing anything wrong or unscientific in my testing? Let me know. Until next time, thank you for watching.