Now let’s switch to FAT32 and see what happens. The first diagram shows that the Maxtor E14E100 is the slowest among the three as concerns creating (writing) our file patterns. This is especially conspicuous with the two many-small-files patterns.

The Maxtor E14E100 is again slower than the other two drives at reading. There’s small difference between the results of the drives in this test, though.

The Maxtor E14E100 is a bit faster than the Lacie drive at copying files within one and the same partition, but it is still rather far behind the other Maxtor. The larger buffer of the latter model might be considered as a contributing factor to its success, but it should have shown up in FAT32, too, which it did not.

The last subtest is about copying files from one partition to another. Once again we see the E14E100 model being much slower than the 250MB Maxtor and slightly faster than the drive from Lacie.