Western Digital My Passport Wireless SSD Review (2TB)

WD MY PASSPORT DIGITAL SSD TEARDOWN AND TEST

Tearing down the My Passport Digital SSD was a bit tricky as it is built so well.  Until you literally push a knife into the right edge, this could just about fool you that it was a single piece assembly. Taking a close look at the bottom, we noticed a line running along the outside edge.  From there, we were able to pry a corner just a bit without damage, at which time three clips on the top and two clips on the bottom let go of the base.

In this picture we can see the top which still contains the 6700mAh battery (which is the heaviest part of this design BTW), the main PCB with the SATA 3 connector, the SSD itself, and the base cover.

This is actually the base of the PCB but we can see the SD card slot, USB 3.0 micro-B slot, USB 2.0, SAT 3 SSD connector as well as the battery connector just below that.

On the top of the PCB, we can see the large black ic which is a Realtek RT1195PN CPU based on 2 Cortex A7 cores and a Mali-400mpz CPU.  Beside it to the right is a NANYA 256mb cache chip and below to the left is the ARM STM32F030 32-bit MCU.

The SSD is a Sandisk X600 SAT 3 SSD which actually surprised us as we were hoping we might find a M.2 SSD inside.  This SSD contains a Marvel 88SS1074 4-channel SATA 3 controller, a Micron DRAM cache chip and eight modules of Sandisk (Western Digital now) 3D NAND flash memory, each with a RAW storage value of 256GB for a final 2TB capacity. Drive identification was accomplished through Crystal Disk Info which clearly identifies the drive and capacity, as well as the fact that the interface is USB.

This SSD would provide up to 560MB/read and 530MB/3 write throughput if it were within a SATA 3 system, but we have to account for the build we see here.   This Crystal DiskMark result lets us know that we can read and write files at 3X the speed that we saw with the previous generation My Passport Wireless Pro, and also that we have 1859GB of storage space available to us.