Which WD External Drives Support UASP?

Hi, I just competed building a PC based upon an ASUS P8Z77-M Pro motherboard. ASUS highlight their implementation of USB 3 UASP, to deliver improved performance over regular USB 3 for external drives. In this article http://event.asus.com/mb/2010/The_Best_USB3_Experience/The_UASP_For_USB3.0.htm the WD My Book is listed as supporting UASP, however I cannot find any reference to this in the product specs. I would love to buy a WD external drive but since I have the opportunity to purchase something to match my new system I like it to include UASP.

Can anyone advise which WD external drives support UASP? I am looking for about a 2TB drive. It doesn’t have to be very portable.

Thanks for your help.

Hi, you can check on the manual for the different supported model. For example for the Passport Essential SE, you can see it on page 4. Check the link below to open the manual.

http://wdc.com/wdproducts/library/UM/ENG/4779-705054.pdf#page=9

Thanks for this suggestion. So, I opened that manual and while the USB 3.0 level support is documented on Page 4, it does not mention UASP. Was this an example of a device you expected did support UASP?

I opened another manual (of the perhaps hundreds of devices), this time for the My Book 3.0, and found similar documentation:

"Drive Interface

Super-Speed USB (USB 3.0) supports data transfer rates up to 5 Gb/s. The My Book 3.0 is backward-compatible with USB 2.0 but defaults to USB 2.0 speed of up to 480 Mb/s. Connection to a USB 1.1 port transfers data at USB 1.1 speed of up to 12 Mb/s)."

Does anyone know if WD does support UASP in any device - without me needing to do random manual opening?

Thanks

A lot of those high transfer speeds are more theoretical than you see in the real world.

Joe