Testbed and Methods

As we have said above, our goal is not to examine the entire parameters range of the reviewed devices. We are interested in one function only: the efficiency of their use as portable storage solutions. The drives and media included into the roundup vary in physical as well as technical characteristics. That’s why we decided to take a really close look at two parameters only: read and write speeds (to be more exact, the time required for reading and writing). A set of files (their total amount differed depending on the capacity of the devices and media) was copied from the system hard disk to the tested device and back again. The time was measured with the help of the progress bar in the window of Total Commander ver. 5.50.

All the tested devices and media in the corresponding drives were connected to the mainboard via their main interface. The devices settings were adjusted for maximum performance.

Our testbed was configured as follows:

• Elitegroup K7S5A;
• AMD Athlon XP 2000+ CPU;
• 512MB PC3200DDR SDRAM;
• ATI RADEON 8500 64MB graphics card;
• IBM DTLA 307015 15GB UDMA/5 HDD;
• USB 2.0/IEEE 1394 combo-controller (NEC 720100 and Agere FW322 chips);
• Windows XP with Service Pack 1 and DirectX 9.0 installed.

Optical drives were processed with Nero Burning Rom version 5.5.10.28. The DVD+RW disk was formatted into UDF by Nero InCD version 3.5.2.40.

Performance

In order to compare the results, we divided the total size of the copied files by the time spent for read and write operations. Besides, we list the price of 1MB of storage for each medium or device (when no media are used).

Of course, Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 was a potential winner from the very beginning. And it proved up to our expectations. The final results might have been even higher if the testbed had had some other system HDD instead of the slightly out-dated IBM: the Barracuda just couldn’t show its highest performance. Anyway, there is no doubt that the standard 3.5” HDD on the ATAPI interface is the most preferable solution for data transportation as far as maximum performance and the storage space available are concerned.

Easyharddisk from Shenzhen Luwen Electronics is a ready-made solution – the drive is already packed up into an elegant plastic case. The capacity of this drive – 20GB – allows storing data amounts suitable for most situations. However, this drive was slower than the other compact HDD, Hitachi Travelstar, used with an external rack that works on USB 2.0, too. So, the race of these two quite comparable devices ended with a win of the Hitachi. Moreover, the price of the “Travelstar plus rack” set is about $50 lower. The only drawback of the sweet pair is the thickness. The Tekram rack is 1.5 times thicker than Easyharddisk. On the other hand, its aluminum case protects the HDD much better.

Among the lightweight devices where we can include IBM Microdrive and Apacer Handy Steno 2.0 (and also, Transcend Card Reader) there is no evident leader. The Hitachi medium showed faster read speed, while the flash drives were quicker at writing.

The 250MB Zip-disk from Iomega is quite a different story. Its read and write speeds with the internal (ATAPI) drive are higher than those of the miniature devices, but lower when the external USB drive is used. The cost of the medium itself (250MB Zip-disk) may be not very high, but you have to buy the drive to use it. So, the price factor as well as low performance with the external drive make it an outsider compared to USB 2.0 flash drives of the same capacity.

The magneto-optical media from Fujitsu don’t show extraordinary performance. The 1.3GB medium was a bit faster than the flash drives and IBM Microdrive at writing on both drives, but appeared the slowest of all reviewed devices at reading.

As for purely optical devices, they show similar results. Both Plextor W4824TU CD-RW and Ricoh MP5125-DP DVD-burner were a bit slower than Easyharddisk from Shenzhen Luwen Electronics. However, the drives of this category can speed up in the nearest future. There are already CD-RW drives that write CD-RWs at 32x speed and DVD-burners that burn disks at 4x speed.