X-bit labs

Imation Micro Hard Drive: Lock Your Data (page 2)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 04/04/2006 | 01:41 PM ]

Testbed and Methods

We tested the external drives in the following benchmarks:

• AIDA32 version 3.95;
• FC-Test version 1.0

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro mainboard
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU
• IBM DTLA-307015 HDD, 15GB
• RADEON 7000 32MB graphics card
• 256MB DDR SDRAM
• Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4

The drive was connected to the USB 2.0 port of the mainboard. The hard drive was formatted for FAT32 file system with the default cluster size.

In order to get a more objective picture of the results, we compared the performance of our today’s hero against that of the external Seagate Pocket hard drive (5GB storage capacity), which we have already reviewed before in our article called Seagate ST650211USB: External Hard Disk Drive to Fit into Your Pocket. It is also built with a miniature hard disk drive inside. This one is a 1-inch HDD, though.

Performance in FC-Test

For our tests in FC-Test package we selected two patterns. The first one included a set of 100 files 1MB each. The second pattern was made of one single file 100MB big. The program algorithm implies that we measure the time it takes the drive to complete certain operations with the file groups of a given size. Using the time measurements we will then calculate the speed of the drives during these operations.

The first diagram shows how fast 100 1-MB files were written (created). The Seagate Pocket Hard Drive is an evident leader here.

Imation Micro Hard Drive falls even farther behind during the file read operations. Seagate Pocket Hard Drive is nearly twice as fast.

Now let’s see how the increase in the file size can affect the performance of Imation Micro Hard Drive. The file has now become 100MB big. The diagram showing how fast it was written (created) demonstrates the minimal performance improvement by our today’s hero. At the same time Seagate Pocket Hard Drive speeded up quite tangibly.

The situation is a little bit more favorable for the Imation Micro Hard Drive during reading. The performance improvement by the Imation drive is more noticeable than that by the Seagate drive, although the latter is still quite far ahead.