Testbed and Methods

Since the hard disk drive we are going to review today supports all three interfaces at the same time, we decided that it would be interesting to see what the actual performance of the device is depending on the interface it is connected through.

We tested the external drive in the following benchmarks:

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

When the hard drive worked via USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 interfaces 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 PC2700 DDR SDRAM
• Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2

When the hard drive was connected via the FireWire 800 interface the testbed configuration looked as follows:

• Intel SE7520BD2 mainboard
• Intel Xeon 2.8/533FSB CPU
• 2 x 512MB DDR SDRAM PC2100 ECC Registered
• IBM DTLA 307015 HDD
• Onboard ATI Rage XL graphics card
• Microsoft Windows 2000 Pro SP4

The drive worked with the FireWire 800 interface via the PCI IEEE 1394b card (Texas Ins., TSB82AA2 chip). The FireWire 400 interface support was provided by the VIA VT6307 chip integrated onto the mainboard. The tests with USB 2.0 interface were conducted by connecting the drive to the USB 2.0 port on the mainboard. During our test session the hard drive was formatted for FAT32 and NTFS file systems with the cluster of default size.

I would like to draw your attention right away to the fact that we used two platforms during this test session. These platforms differed from one another not only on the hardware level, but also in the software. The latter is actually more important for us. Since Windows 2000 doesn’t have the option for enabling maximum performance for the external storage solution that we have in Windows XP. Of course, this factor will have its influence on the benchmark results, which we will point out later during the tests discussion.