Performance in WinBench 99

We will start our discussion of WinBench results with the graphs showing read speed from the HDD surface:

WD Passport 250GB

WD Passport 120GB

The read speed from the surface graphs illustrate very nicely all the changes that were made to the USB electronics of the new drive. The read speed of the new solution reached 35MB/s, which is a very decent result. However, it is definitely not enough for the hard disk drive installed into Passport 250GB: the graphs is pretty level on the most part and only on the last 30GB of space the read speed from the platters gets lower than the data transfer rate along the USB bus. It’s a pity that this HDD doesn’t have eSATA- or at least FireWire interface.

Now let’s check out WinBench 99 results for the 32GB partition formatted for FAT32:

Again passport 250GB performs faster than its smaller counterpart. By the way, this benchmark is very sensitive to the operational mode for external solutions. Namely, if you disable HDD caching, the results will be much worse overall. For example, Passport 250GB scores only 8090 points in High End Disk WinMark 99 and 2990 points in Business Disk WinMark 99 with disabled caching. Pretty modest result, I should say, compared with the 33400 and 15000 points respectively with enabled caching.

In NTFS Passport 250GB retains its superiority.

As we can see from the read graphs, the new HDD is much faster. The USB data transfer rate limits its performance in the beginning of the drive, however, in the end it is the HDD read speed from the platters that acts as a limiting factor. Thanks to higher per platter data density, Passport 250GB outperforms the 120GB model by almost 10MB/s.

As for the access time, the newcomer gets slightly – 0.2ms - ahead of the competitor.