X-bit labs

Seagate USB 2.0 Portable Hard Disk Drive Review (page 4)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 03/09/2005 | 04:44 PM ]

Performance in Winbench99

We will start our discussion of the classical Winbench99 results from the read speed from the surface of the portable drive:

A pretty long horizontal line of the transfer indicates that the drive cannot use its entire potential speed because of the limitations imposed by the actual bandwidth of the USB 2.0 interface. It is the first time we see a maximum value of 34MB/s, the data transfer rate along USB 2.0 interface is usually just a little bit above 30MB. This way we should point out that Seagate drive uses the most efficient IDE-USB 2.0 controller of all external solutions we have already tested in our labs.

Let’s compare the performance of our testing participants in FAT32 file system. On the diagram below we see that the external solution is defeated by the standard drive in both major subtests: Business and High-End Disk WinMark.

When we switched to NTFS file system we saw a noticeable performance drop by both hard disk drives. The portable solution demonstrated the biggest performance reduction in Business Disk WinMark. Like in the previous case, Portable External hard Drive is considerably slower than the opponent.