Performance in WinBench 99

when we tried to test a hard drive of this size with an old benchmarking tool like Winbench 99, we faced some difficulties connected with the benchmark’s inability to correctly display the entire storage capacity of the drive. Therefore, we limited the size of the test space to 32GB.

Let’s start discussing the results of Winbench 99 with the surface read speed graphs.

• FireWire 800 (graph)
• FireWire 400 (graph)
• USB 2.0 (graph)

The diagrams show very well the actual peak bandwidths for each interface. I can admit that in this case the results are very close to the claimed specifications. By taking a closer look at the graphs above we can say that with USB 2.0 interface the peak value reaches 33MB/s, with FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 – 42MB/s and 90MB/s respectively.

Now let’s take a look at the hard drive performance on the first 32GB of storage space. Let’s start with the results obtained for FAT32 file system.

The diagram above shows very well the advantages of this storage solution when it is hooked up via FireWire 800 interface. The same is true about the advantage of FireWire 400 over USB 2.0: the results speak for themselves.

In NTFS file system the situation is slightly different. The advantages of FireWire 800 interface over FireWire 400 interface are almost negligible. Of course, the use of slower file system explains the overall lower results. However, the use of two different operating systems could also tell on different performance results for the used interfaces.

The last diagram shows the surface read speed. Of course, the best results are achieved with FireWire 800 interface. The results obtained with FireWire 400 are noticeably lower. USB 2.0 is the least efficient of all.