Read+write speeds of Elements+My Book 16G+ drives

Portable Drives
1

I have some of these drives, and in my speed tests, they get up to around 225 MB/s reading and writing. I also use WD Ultrastar drives, which are more expensive, and read+write 260MB/s when empty. I usually use 16G (18 vendor “gigabytes”) drives.

The thing is, I haven’t got any empty Elements or MyBook drives, so I can’t easily speed-test them. Drives have the highest speed when they’re empty, bcoz the first sectors written to are on the disk’s outer rim. I’d be tempted to switch to Elements drives if they can RW 250M when empty. So it would be helpful if you can do any of these things:

  • Speedtest an empty Elements drive in reading and writing long (eg 128M) sequential blocks, using, say, CrystalDiskMark, or just using Task Manager, & post results here.
  • Explain how to tell a hard drive to read a long sequential block from the outermost sectors, regardless of whether they’re part of a file.
  • Explain how to find the oldest file above 100M on a drive.
2

Have you visited the WD web site and looked at the information provided? Check out the specifications.

Look at Products.

3

The data sheet gives no information at all on speed. Not even drive RPM.
There is no separate data sheet by storage capacity, and WD has used wildly different hard drives for the different capacities. Some are 5400; some are 7200.

4

WD Elements and My Book drives don’t list speed or RPM because they use different internal drives. Some are 5400 RPM, some are 7200 RPM. To check what you have, use CrystalDiskInfo or read the label on the drive. For consistent specs and speed, use WD Ultrastar or Red Pro.