WD My Passport vs "For Mac" version - is the Mac version necessary?

Towhead said:

But does it work with your Mac USB 3 port at USB 3 speeds?

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I get about 100mbs. Its a slow drive. USB 3 or even Thunderbolt can't fix this.

lightz39 said:

I get about 100mbs. Its a slow drive. USB 3 or even Thunderbolt can't fix this.

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Thanks. But ... that wasn't really my question - I suppose I should have worded it differently. What one hopes for when they ask questions on a forum are sufficient details. The one thing that I find occurs often on Macrumors, is that everyone gives a veiled answer to every question and if the geniuses who do answer questions would just cover all the angles, it would help.

Here's the question I should have ask: Regardless of the internal drive speed, does the WD Passport USB 3 enclosure actually operate at USB 3 with the Mac, or does it work at USB 2 speeds because the Mac has some kind of weird compatibility problem with USB 3 devices. I've got a Mac Mini on the way so I'm quite interested in knowing if there's anything I should know.

Another way of looking at the question is; is the bottleneck the drive, or is it a fall-back to USB 2 due to incompatibility? If it's the drive that's the bottleneck, then one can assume that there should be no noticeable lag or stuttering in the system caused by USB 3 utilization as there is with USB 2.

It works on usb 3 off my retina.

Towhead said:

Regardless of the internal drive speed, does the WD Passport USB 3 enclosure actually operate at USB 3 with the Mac, or does it work at USB 2 speeds because the Mac has some kind of weird compatibility problem with USB 3 devices.

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If you connect a USB3 device to USB3 port - it will operate at UBS3 speed.

Jup - USB 3 "SuperSpeed" (5 Gbps) link negotiated on my Mac Mini 2012.

And yes, about 100 MB/s when it feels spiffy. Not that I really need the speed. Just the storage.

Quiet in use.

You might also want to take a look at another post I made which contains some tips and information for the WD My Passport USB 3.0:

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/16569773/

The Mac software tools seem to be of pretty decent quality.

Cheers,
Nikolaj

nikolajlr said:

Jup - USB 3 "SuperSpeed" (5 Gbps) link negotiated on my Mac Mini 2012.

And yes, about 100 MB/s when it feels spiffy. Not that I really need the speed. Just the storage.

Quiet in use.

You might also want to take a look at another post I made which contains some tips and information for the WD My Passport USB 3.0:

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/16569773/

The Mac software tools seem to be of pretty decent quality.

Cheers,
Nikolaj

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Thanks for the link. There's a great review linked to also. It mentions some other concern I have I wanted to bring up - that there's essentially a virtual region of 185MB software which incidentally, as I've read (Amazon review), causes the passport to be incompatible with Linux.

Can this region be wiped out and recovered? (I have not yet opened my drive - perhaps worth reselling). Is it this region that makes the drive a PC vs. a Mac - in other words, do the "for mac" drives have different 'built-in' software? Or can I truly just wipe the sucker clean and recover all 2TB?

Towhead said:

Can this region be wiped out and recovered? (I have not yet opened my drive - perhaps worth reselling). Is it this region that makes the drive a PC vs. a Mac - in other words, do the "for mac" drives have different 'built-in' software? Or can I truly just wipe the sucker clean and recover all 2TB?

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That sounds like a misunderstanding (?). At least on my "for Mac"-version the software was a .dmg-file at about 55 MB in the root of the hard drive. I just deleted it after installing the software. It autoupdates and if I need to install it again I can download it from WD's website.

Actually reading the review I linked to I see that the Windows software is the 185 MB and it is probably just a .exe or a .msi executable like the .dmg on the "for Mac"-version.

Even if it had a "shadow" partition I can't imagine why it shouldn't work with Linux (long time Linux user here).

Best regards,
Nikolaj

nikolajlr said:

That sounds like a misunderstanding (?). At least on my "for Mac"-version the software was a .dmg-file at about 55 MB in the root of the hard drive. I just deleted it after installing the software. It autoupdates and if I need to install it again I can download it from WD's website.

Actually reading the review I linked to I see that the Windows software is the 185 MB and it is probably just a .exe or a .msi executable like the .dmg on the "for Mac"-version.

Even if it had a "shadow" partition I can't imagine why it shouldn't work with Linux (long time Linux user here).

Best regards,
Nikolaj

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Well, I broke open the drive and fiddled with it. It turns out the 185MB is the size of the journaling information for HFS+J. By choosing different formats, the spaced consumed varies - for example, formatting the drive as MS-DOS FAT, the space consumed drops to 1.7MB.

That said, I agree that this drive ought to work with any OS that use the appropriate protocol, it's a strange set of comments to read on Amazon reviews for this drive.

Spiffy drive, that's for sure. Now to decide how to partition it ...