Testbed and Methods

I used WinBench 99 2.0 and FC-Test 1.0 as my benchmarking tools. The testbed was configured like follows:

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

I will pit the reviewed drive against another Maxtor from the same family (the 250GB E01G250 model – see our article called External 250GB HDD from Maxtor: OneTouch II E01G250 Review for details about it) and against one more device of the same class, the 120-gigabyte Lacie d2 FireWire Hard Drive.

Performance in WinBench 99

Before reading the numbers below, take a look at the data-transfer graph:

The data-transfer rate graph is a perfectly straight line that goes slightly below 33MB/s. This is a little lower than 34MB/s as declared by the manufacturer. The straight like is an indication of the drive’s inability to show its speed potential fully because it is limited by the effective bandwidth of the USB 2.0 interface.