X-bit labs

Three External Hard Disk Drives with 120GB Storage Capacity

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 07/06/2004 | 01:14 PM ]

Nearly all of the major manufacturers of hard disk drives have recently expanded their model lines of external storage devices, making us pay more attention to this market. Today, we would like to offer you the results of our testing session with three 120GB external HDDs from Maxtor and Western Digital.

Table of contents:

• Testing Participants
  
• Maxtor A14B120
  
• Western Digital WDXU1200BB
  
• Western Digital WDXC1200JB
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in WinBench 99
  
• WinBench 99: FAT32
  
• WinBench 99: FAT32 (32GB capacity)
  
• WinBench 99: NTFS
  
• WinBench 99: NTFS (32GB)
  
• WinBench 99: Disk Access Time
  
• Performance in FC Test
  
• FC Test: FAT32 (Create)
  
• FC Test: FAT32 (Read)
  
• FC Test: FAT32 (Copy Near)
  
• FC Test: FAT32 (Copy Far)
  
• FC Test: NTFS (Create)
  
• FC Test: NTFS (Read)
  
• FC Test: NTFS (Copy Near)
  
• FC Test: NTFS (Copy Far)
  
• Conclusion
  

Nearly all of the major manufacturers of hard disk drives have recently expanded their model lines of external storage devices, making us pay more attention to this market.

Today, we would like to offer you the results of our testing session with three 120GB external HDDs from Maxtor and Western Digital. This capacity seems to be the optimal one if we take the cost per one megabyte of storage as the guiding factor.

Testing Participants

Maxtor A14B120

This external drive from Maxtor belongs to the OneTouch family. The device owes its name to the elongated button, by pressing which you automatically back up your files onto it. The button is placed on the metallic gray-blue case and has a LED that indicates the drive’s status. The butt-end of the drive carries a power switch, a USB port, a power connector and vent holes.

The device uses a 120GB hard disk drive with a 2MB buffer. The spindle rotation speed is 7200rpml; the declared seek time is 9.3msec. The device supports the USB 2.0 interface, which gives it a sustained data-transfer rate up to 34MB/s. The dimensions of the A14B120 are 41x140x210mm; its weight – 1.38kg.

The paper box also includes a power adapter with cable, a stand for placing the drive vertically, a USB cable, two floppies (with drivers, utilities and Dantz Retrospect Express) and a brief user manual.

The average retail price of the A14B120 model is $180.