WD passport USB 3.0 speed

What exact Mac do you use?
What does show up in Applications / Utilities / System Report > Hardware > USB?
Can you make a screenshot and attach it to your next post?

Mossmann said:

Its a brand new rMBP

Click to expand...

What about the rest of my questions? Did you use the USB cable provided with the WD Passport HDD? Did you format the HDD? If not, go to Finder, press CMD+SHIFT+C and select the external drive, press CMD+I and tell us, what it says after General > Format:?

Thanks for the screenshots, everything seems to be alright.
Which application go you those "30 MB/s" speed?

You can use the following applications to benchmark the speed of your HDD:

• AJA System Test
• Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
• Xbench

Mossmann said:

Yeah I used Blackmagic. On the SSD it gave me 400mbs, shame to kill my computers performance with 30mbs on my photos and videos

Click to expand...

Try the other two, to see, if you get similar speeds? Have you tried the HDD on both USB ports? If it is still not going as fast as it promises (30 MB/s is USB 2.0 speed and even a slow 5.400 RPM HDD is faster nowadays), can you return it?

make sure you're using the cable that came with it. it should have a blue plug that goes into the computer (probably just the inside of the connector will be blue). The end that goes into the drive will have what looks like 2 plugs next to each other. like the pic at the top of this page

i think i have the same drive, the first run with black magic was 30-write / 75-read. after a couple runs it was getting up to 75-write / 80-read.
(that first low number may have just been the drive coming up to speed)

I've got a USB3 external drive dock, that i put a SSD into, was getting about 110 read/write.

I have the same issue with two WD usb 3 HD...

I think the cable might be problem actually... another user reported having the same problem, changed the cable, everything went fine...

Didn't have the chance to try myself, if you do so, keep us informed


good night (well, depending where you live)

Something is wrong.

My MBP came with a 750GB HDD. Before I upgraded to a SSD I tested the HDD using BlackMagic Speed Test and was achieving around the 100 read and write. Feel free to check my most recent YouTube video - link to channel in sig - for the actual speed test.

I purchased a cheap USB3 caddy (Icey Box) and stuck my 750GB HDD into it considering I no longer needed it in my laptop. Another speed test on the now USB3 drive gave me the exact same 100 read and write - so the same speed as I was getting when the drive was in the laptop itself, showing the bottleneck with this particular USB3 drive is now the drive itself.

You should be getting more then 30MB/s from your drive, even if it's a 5400rpm (which it most probably is).