X-bit labs

Seagate ST650211USB: External Hard Disk Drive to Fit into Your Pocket (page 3)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 01/11/2005 | 10:02 AM ]

Testbed and Methods

We used the following software during our test session:

• FC-Test version 1.0;
• AIDA32 version 3.95.

We ran all benchmarks on the following test platform:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro mainboard;
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU;
• IBM DTLA-307015 15GB HDD;
• Radeon 7000 32MB graphics card;
• 256MB RAM;
• Microsoft Windows 2000 OS with Service Pack 4.

The pocket storage drive was connected to USB 2.0 port of the mainboard. The hard disk drive was formatted in FAT32 file system with the cluster of default size.

In order to evaluate the working parameters of our today’s testing participant, we compared its performance with that of another similar product from Seagate – Seagate ST1 (see our article called Seagate ST1 1-Inch Hard Disk Drive Review) designed in Compact Flash format, and a miniature Slimmo Disk4U.

Performance in FC-Test

For our tests in FC-Test package we selected two patterns. The first one included a set of 100 files 1MB each. The second pattern was made of one single file 100MB big.

The first diagram shows the read speed of the tested devices when they work with 100 1Mb-big files. The pocket HDD from Seagate is just a little bit ahead of its fellow, while compared to Slimmo Disk4U, it demonstrated almost a twice higher performance.

When we get to the write speed test (creating) for 100 files 1Mb each, the resulting picture doesn’t actually change. Again our external HDD outpaces another Seagate’s product and proves almost 1.5 times faster than the competing Slimmo Disk4U solution.

The increase in the tested file size up to 100MB causes minimal read speed changes for the new Seagate pocket HDD. Here it appears to be just like its relative, showing similar behavior. Only Slimmo Disk4U manages to notably improve the performance.

The larger size of the pattern file has very positive influence on the performance of our testing participants also during writing. The Seagate pocket HDD gets about 1.5 times faster than in case of 100 smaller files. It is again just a little bit ahead of its counterpart designed in Compact Flash format. At the same time, it is more than twice as fast compared to Slimmo Disk4U solution.