2 TB Portable External HDD Duel: Seagate Backup Plus Slim vs. WD My Passport Ultra

Inside the Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2 TB

Opening the WD My Passport Ultra 2 TB, we found a 2.5” hard disk drive, model WD20NMVW, with the USB 3.0 interface embedded on its printed circuit board. It has 8 MiB of cache and spins at 5,200 rpm. An interesting detail is that this drive is 15 mm thick, while common 2.5” drives are 9.5 mm or 7 mm thick. This is because this little drive has four platers inside.

Figure 11: the hard disk drive

Figure 12 shows the detail of the drive. Notice that it has rubber pads at the sides; they help absorb vibrations and even small impacts, which is an excellent feature to have on a portable hard disk drive.

Figure 12: circuit board