X-bit labs

Two External Hard Disk Drives with 400GB and 500GB Storage Capacity (page 7)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 03/18/2006 | 10:50 AM ]

Conclusion

The Maxtor OneTouch III has been superior over the Seagate Pushbutton Backup External Hard Drive in this test session. Of course, we should make allowances for the different storage capacity of the tested devices since Seagate’s announced 500GB external drive in this series was not available at the time of our writing this review. Anyway, the victory of the Maxtor looks well deserved. This drive has higher read/write speeds in low-level IOMeter tests as indicated by the results of the drives when they are attached via the FireWire interface which limits their performance less than USB 2.0 does. Judging by the IOMeter results, we should have expected the drives to have similar speeds when working via USB 2.0, but it is not so in practice. The Maxtor OneTouch III delivers a much higher performance in WinBench 99 and FC-Test with both FireWire and USB 2.0 interfaces. Moreover, the Maxtor is sometimes faster than the Seagate when they are connected via USB 2.0 and FireWire, respectively. This can be explained by the difference in the cache memory amount (the Maxtor’s 16MB buffer against the Seagate’s 8MB) as well as by more efficient firmware algorithms. Besides that, the interface controllers may also affect the overall performance of the drives. The controllers will probably be unified in the future when the two companies merge into one, but this effect is quite possible with the current models.

And a few words about the interfaces. Like in many other of our test sessions, FireWire has been superior over USB 2.0, meaning that the drives deliver a higher performance when attached to a FireWire controller. Although the theoretical peak bandwidth of FireWire is lower than that of USB 2.0, it is more efficient in practice and you should definitely prefer it wherever possible.

It’s going to be interesting to watch the changes in Seagate’s external HDD manufacturing policy in the future, but so far the Maxtor OneTouch III seems to be the better buy between the two top models. It is also the optimal choice if you need the maximum storage capacity you can get. The speed factor becomes the more important when there are large amounts of data to be written to or read from the drive, minimizing your waiting time. From this point of view, the FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b) interface should be most appropriate, too. Such drives are already available in Maxtor’s product line-up and we will test them on our site soon. We will also probably see this interface in new large-capacity external drives from the joined Seagate-Maxtor company.