X-bit labs

Ultra-Small Hard Disk Drives: Does It Make Sense? (page 7)

Category: Storage

by Aleksey Meyev

[ 08/29/2007 | 12:56 PM ]

Performance in FC-Test 1.0

Unlike Intel IOMeter, FC-Test is closer to real life situations. The program writes and reads a few file-sets of particular size and measures the time it takes to perform each operation. This helps calculate the speed of the drive and see how it depends on the number and size of the files in test patterns. We will use three file-sets that differ in the size (1, 10 and 100MB) and number (1, 10, and 100) of files included. Practice suggests that a 100MB file is large enough to reveal the maximum performance of a USB flash drive and using a larger file doesn’t affect the results much.

No wonder happened: with files of any size the Seagate Pocket Hard Drive works slower than the flash drive. And if with smaller files the performance difference is “only” twofold, then incase of a 100MB file the gap gets four times larger. Frankly speaking, the maximum speed of 3.8MB/s Seagate Pocket Hard Drive demonstrated in this test is definitely not enough for efficient work with large files these days. There are a lot of contemporary USB Flash drives that have already hit 5MB/s and even 10MB/s speeds, and the fastest ones can boast 20MB/s and higher. As for the 2.5” hard disk drives, I don’t even want to mention them here: their results are more than an order higher.

The change from writing to reading, didn’t really affect the results: the Seagate Pocket Hard Drive is about 3.5 times slower than the flash drive, no matter what files they are working with.