Some time ago we had an opportunity to take a closer look at a 10GB external hard disk drive, which laid itself out trying to squeeze a bit of data through the narrow Output of the USB 1.1 interface. Watching this suffering was simply unbearable and instructing at the same time… To tell the truth, we may sound a bit too emotional now to you. However, you will not deny that we are actually right: USB 1.1 interface for a hard disk drive can be compared with the irons put around the sprinter's feet. So, the companies developing solutions like that seem to be nothing other but medieval inquisitors wit the whole lot of different tortures.

Well, time never stands still. The autumn passed, almost half the winter passed as well and… There appeared some very curious device called Hyundai Cutie. Although when we took a closer look at it we noticed that this portable hard disk drive is made by Sarotech Company, and Hyundai brand name is mentioned only on its case.

The device is of pretty small size, but we have to note that Cutie is still a bit larger than ZIV-drives. Aluminum case has two plastic sections on both ends. One of these plastic sections has a power supply connector, info connector and HDD status indicator.

As for the drive's origin, you can get all the info from a sticker on the reverse side of its case:

Well, let's believe that Hyundai trade mark is simply required to push this solution into the market successfully. :-)

The HDD is shipped in a beautiful big box:

The box will definitely catch your eye with a vivid sign saying "USB 2.0 type".

Inside the box you will also find a brief user's manual, a CD-disk with the drivers (designed as a business card):

And a set of cables, of course:

This set includes an interface cable, extension cord and a special cable taking power from the keyboard connector (it is needed if you decide to use this HDD with a notebooks, as they can't provide enough power for this HDD via the USB port).

In the box you will also find a small but very pleasant "customer bonus": a nice-looking HDD carrier:

Which you may use not only to carry your Cutie hard drive, but also as nice bag for your own small but useful stuff, like pens, business cards, etc.

We see the major idea of this carrier to protect the HDD against shock, as you never know what may happen to your hard disk drive when it is traveling inside your suitcase.

Of course, we couldn't stand the temptation to find out what is inside the Cutie case. Having opened the drive by unscrewing it in two places we saw this:

  

Do you know what this is? It is a 2.5" IBM DJSA HDD connected to a special board with an IDE-USB bridge chip from In-System. To our great disappointment, we failed to read the chip marking, but we do know the HDD name now! Let's have a look at its basic parameters:

Well, judging by its features, this is not the newest notebook IDE storage solution, but it is more than enough for our needs.

The only upsetting thing about it was the fact that the drive is not fastened to the Cutie case from the inside besides a small guide and we had an impression that it was slightly "dangling" inside the case. In other words, one end of the HDD is very firmly joined to the board by means of a converter, and the other end is simply hanging in the air. We think that the developers should have though a bit more about the fastening mechanism for their solution, as it is not a cheap one, to be so light-minded about it.

When we took a closer look at the converter board we noticed that the connector is not filled with the "glue" as in case of Hyundai ZIV and the connection is secured only by the friction force. On the one hand, it may be considered a disadvantage, but on the other hand, it gives us a brilliant opportunity to disconnect the HDD from the expansion card and test it with the UDMA66 interface and with USB 1.1 interface, so that we could make the difference between USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 more illustrative.

Testbed and Methods

We tested the newcomer in the following test system:

• Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 600MHz CPU;
• ASUS CUBX-E mainboard, bios 1007A;
• 2 x 128MB PC133 SDRAM by Hyundai;
• Matrox Millennium 4MB graphics card;
• Adaptec 29160N SCSI-controller;
• Windows 2000 Pro/SP2.

We tested Cutie HDD in three interfaces:

• USB 1.1: we used the USB port on the mainboard;
• USB 2.0: we used an external Tekram DC-602W controller;
• UDMA66: we used an external Promise Ultra66 controller.

Here are the benchmarks used:

• WinBench 99 1.2
• HDTach 2.61

The HDTach benchmark was run on an unformatted drive. For testing in WinBench we used FAT32 and NTFS file systems to format the hard disk drive as one logical drive of the maximum size with the default cluster. All the tests were run 4 times and then the average results were taken for the diagrams. The HDD didn't rest for cooling down between the tests.

Drivers

As for the Promise Ultra66 drivers and USB chipset port, we discovered no problems with those. The trouble started when we passed over to USB 2.0 :(

First we undertook a number of failed attempts with MSI K7T266Pro2-RU mainboard with a USB 2.0 chip from NEC onboard (USB 2.0 simply didn't work, just like MSI's web-site on that day. Then it turned out that USB 2.0 did work on that mainboard, but only if you reflash a special BIOS version). After that we decided to act differently: we took an external Tekram DC-602W controller, which is a PCI card with the same NEC chip on it. From then on Hyundai Cutie drivers installation went with a run. When the drivers for the controller and USB HDD got installed, we could see the following on the Device Manager properties page:

Here we would like to let the benchmarks results break in :)

Performance

HDTach 2.61

Knowing the difference between the maximum bandwidth of USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 (480 and 12Mbit/sec respectively), we could expect that the performance of the HDD with these interfaces will be also very much different. Although our suppositions proved absolutely correct, the results nevertheless were beyond our bravest expectations:

So, if we compare these two interfaces then we will see that the bandwidth of USB 2.0 is 40 times higher, the read speed from the HDD cache - 20 times higher and the linear read speed - 15 times higher.

As we see, the read and write speeds of IBM DJSA HDD connected via USB 2.0 interface are just a bit lower than the speeds with an UDMA66 controller. At the same time, the speeds with USB 1.1 are unbelievably low.

The second interesting discovery of ours: this HDD doesn't use even 1/4 of the UDMA66 bandwidth, though we suspect that in case of a faster hard disk drive the performance difference between the USB 2.0 and UDMA66 could be somewhat different.

Now let's pass over to WinBench tests.

WinBench99 1.2 FAT32

We were inspired by pretty high performance of Hyundai Cutie with USB 2.0, so we decided to include this test in our review. Let's see if this decision was correct:

DTR: Beginning

Graph

Graph

Graph

We should admit that the results are pretty interesting. Especially exciting is the contrast between USB 2.0 and USB 1.1. Take a look at the linear read graphs for each interface: you'll simply love it!

Most of all we liked the USB 1.1 graph. Its ideal shape implies that the surface of IBM DJSA HDD is simply perfect ;-)

And again the diagram gives us a very illustrative picture of the difference between USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 HDD connection options and of the almost equal results of USB 2.0 and UDMA66.

WinBench99 1.2 NTFS

The results of our hard disk drive with USB 2.0 and UDMA66 interface in NTFS get a bit lower, but in case of USB 1.1 the performance is even slower.

If we look at the numeric results, then we will see that in Business test Cutie with USB 1.1 is twice as slow as with USB 2.0 and UDMA66, and in High-End test, Cutie with USB 1.1 is 5 times slower than with USB 2.0 and UDMA66.

Copy Operations

Copying files is not a scientific benchmark, but it is very easy to understand :)

To compare the interfaces performance we took two randomly selected folders from the system disk drive (Quantum FB EL 10.2GB) called "Program Files" and "Soft" and copied these folders with all the files onto the Hyundai Cutie previously formatted in FAT32. We measured the time needed to complete this copy operation. The results of this "test" are given in the table below:

This way, the results of this test show that in case of equal testing conditions (the same testbed and relatively slow system HDD) Cutie with USB 2.0 appeared 7 times faster than with USB 1.1. Moreover, the performance difference between the results obtained with USB 2.0 and UDMA66 is insignificant.

Conclusion

Well, this how we managed to turn a good-looking product into a well-running product just by replacing easily the IDE-USB bridge chip. This solution is fast, functional and not that expensive at all (a flash storage solution with similar storage capacity will cost much more).

In conclusion, we would like to sum up the high and lows of Hyundai Cutie:

Highs:

• Small dimensions and light weight;
• High speed with USB 2.0 interface;
• Large storage capacity;
• Nice package.

Lows:

• No damping pads between the case and the HDD.

Too few lows, don't you think so? Let us add another fly to the ointment then. Although this is no problem for Hyundai Cutie, the USB 2.0 interface is not so widely spread yet, even though we wish it were. And it is surely evident that a HDD as well as any other hardware should preferably use the new USB 2.0.

P.S.: In the meanwhile we found out that IDE hard disk drives and serial interface are no antagonists at all. We wish there were not so much waiting for SerialATA left… :(