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'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).