X-bit labs

Western Digital My Book Pro Edition 500GB External HDD Review (page 3)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 01/06/2007 | 11:24 AM ]

Performance in Intel IOMeter

Sequential Read & Write Patterns

I’ll first run a few synthetic tests with the help of IOMeter. In the sequential read/write test the drive is receiving a stream of read/write requests with a request queue depth of 4. The size of the requested data block is changed once every minute. Thus, this test shows the dependence of the drive’s sequential read/write speed on the size of the requested data block. For the sake of readability, shortened names for the drives and abbreviations for the interfaces will be used here and elsewhere in the review.

Sequential reading comes first. The diagram shows the advantage the Western Digital drive is given by its support of the FireWire interface: the max sequential read speed is much higher in this case – almost two times the speed the drive has when using USB 2.0. The WDG1T5000N also performs faster with FireWire 400 than with USB 2.0. Comparing the drive to its opponents, they are all roughly similar when using USB 2.0. With FireWire 400, the Western Digital is slower than the Maxtor OneTouch III. It is also slower with FireWire 800 when reading small data blocks (up to 4KB).

The sequential writing diagram proves the highest efficiency of FireWire 800, too. Using this interface, the Western Digital delivers two times its own performance with FireWire 400. But it shows the slowest speed when connected via USB 2.0.

As for its standing among the opponents, the WDG1T5000N is slower at sequential writing than the Maxtor OneTouch III when both are using FireWire 400. The same is true for FireWire 800, but only when the WDG1T5000N is processing small data blocks (2KB and smaller). When the drives are all connected to USB 2.0 ports, the Western Digital is the slowest of them.