Testbed and Methods

The following testing utilities were used:

• IOMeter 2003.02.15
• WinBench 99 2.0
• FC-Test 1.0

Testbed configuration:

• ASUS P5WDG2 WS Pro mainboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E2160 processor
• IBM DTLA-307015 system disk, 15GB
• Radeon X600 graphics card
• 1GB DDR2-800 SDRAM
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2

We formatted the drive in FAT32 and NTFS as one partition with the default cluster size. For certain tests 32GB partitions were created on the drive and formatted in FAT32 and NTFS with the default cluster size, too. The drive was connected to the mainboard’s back-panel USB port.

Performance in WinBench 99

As expected, the data-transfer graph is a horizontal straight line that goes somewhat higher than 30MBps. The USB bandwidth is a bottleneck that conceals any differences between today’s HDDs working via this interface.