X-bit labs

Fujitsu Handy Drive 120GB Portable Storage Solution Review (page 7)

Category: Storage

by Aleksey Meyev

[ 07/05/2007 | 11:14 AM ]

Performance in WinBench 99

First, you can have a look at the data-transfer diagrams of the drives:

Fujitsu Handy Drive

Transcend JetFlash

Western Digital Passport

HD-227FW

HD-227U2

The Fujitsu surpasses the other USB-interfaced drives at the beginning of the disk, reaching 32MB/s and being only slower than the FireWire-interfaced model. This indicates a good and fast USB-ATA adapter. However, the horizontal stretch of the graph is short and the Fujitsu is slower than the other USB models from the 40GB mark due to its lower spindle rotation speed.

And now we will run WinBench 99 on a 32GB partition created on the drives and formatted in FAT32.

The Fujitsu is the slowest of all in High-End Disk Winmark, scoring 2000 points less than the leader Transcend StoreJet. But then the Handy Drive takes fourth place in Business Disk Winmark, outperforming the HD-227FW.

It’s somewhat different in NTFS: the HD-227U2 takes the lead while the Fujitsu takes fourth place in both tests, leaving behind the FireWire-interfaced HD-227FW that performs poorly here. The latter did well in IOMeter, but doesn’t look good in the practical test.

Let’s examine the data-transfer speeds now.

As was to be expected from the data-transfer diagrams, the Fujitsu shows a high speed at the beginning of the disk, second after the HD-227FW, but its end-of-the-disk speed is too low in comparison with the others.

The access time is poor as you might have expected from a 4200rpm HDD. The Fujitsu is slower than its faster opponents by 1.5 seconds and more. It is the poor access time that explains the low results of the Fujitsu Handy Drive in synthetic benchmarks.