X-bit labs

Roundup: Six 2.5-Inch Hard Disk Drives with 160GB Storage Capacity (page 9)

Category: Storage

by Aleksey Meyev

[ 12/05/2007 | 03:04 PM ]

Performance in FC-Test

Now we will check performance of the hard disk drives with the FC-Test program. Two 32GB partitions are created on the drives and formatted in NTFS and then in FAT32. After that a file-set is created of the hard disk. It is then read from the disk, copied within the same partition and then copied into another partition. The time taken to perform these operations is measured and the speed of the drive is calculated.

To remind you, the Windows and Programs file-sets consist of a large number of small files whereas the other three patterns (ISO, MP3, and Install) include a few large files each.

I’ll discuss the FAT32 results first.

It’s easy to pinpoint the loser, which is the Hitachi drive. The Toshiba is also poor with every file-set except Windows (which contains very small files). It is somewhat more difficult to see the leader. The Samsung delivers high performance with small files (quite forgetting that it didn’t do well in the synthetic tests) while the HDD from Western Digital is superior on large files.

The losers and winners change their places here. The Fujitsu has the best read speed irrespective of the file-set while the Seagate is the slowest of all. On the other hand, the HDDs all deliver similar speeds with little difference from each other.

The speed of copying within one partition depends on what exactly file-set is being copied. The Samsung puts its excellent writing capability to good use with small files and leaves no chance to its opponents. As the average file size increases in the MP3 and Install patterns, the Fujitsu takes the lead. And the Seagate is the best with the ISO pattern. I want to mark the HDDs from Samsung and Fujitsu as having a consistently good speed across all of the file-sets.

There are almost no changes when the distance of copying is increased: the Samsung is better with small files, the Fujitsu with large files, and the Samsung with the ISO file-set.