I'm not sure when WD switched over to SMR for all of their Passport drives, but the new one is definitely going to be SMR while the old one may have been CMR. SMR could lead to worse write performance than a similarly spec'd CMR drive, especially for very large sustained writes (which most reviews don't cover).
I don't think there's any technical reason a 5TB drive has to be slower than a 4TB drive. If anything a larger drive could be faster because it's higher density. (but practically not a big difference)
Did you check the official specs to make sure they are working as advertised?
Does the transfer speed matter as long as its enough to play movies without buffering?
I use a usb sata dock and four mixed drives totaling around 12tb+ a 6tb internal drive. Tramsfer to/from the dock is really slow so i cant use it for games, but it is good enough for media.
You know about as much as me. I'd say if you're on a private tracker ask those guys. They're autistic af when it comes to data storage. Full RAID set ups, backups, backups for backups, backups for those backups. They're crazy, man.
I'm not sure when WD switched over to SMR for all of their Passport drives, but the new one is definitely going to be SMR while the old one may have been CMR. SMR could lead to worse write performance than a similarly spec'd CMR drive, especially for very large sustained writes (which most reviews don't cover).
I don't think there's any technical reason a 5TB drive has to be slower than a 4TB drive. If anything a larger drive could be faster because it's higher density. (but practically not a big difference)
Did you check the official specs to make sure they are working as advertised?
Does the transfer speed matter as long as its enough to play movies without buffering?
I use a usb sata dock and four mixed drives totaling around 12tb+ a 6tb internal drive. Tramsfer to/from the dock is really slow so i cant use it for games, but it is good enough for media.
You know about as much as me. I'd say if you're on a private tracker ask those guys. They're autistic af when it comes to data storage. Full RAID set ups, backups, backups for backups, backups for those backups. They're crazy, man.
Have you cracked the shell to make sure it's not five 1GB thumbsticks soldered to a board?
Chineseum, man. Not even once.
That's what he said.