X-bit labs

Passport from Western Digital: Portable USB Hard Disk Drive Review (page 5)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 04/06/2005 | 04:38 PM ]

Performance in FC-Test

FC-test is our best tool for evaluation of the real practical performance of our testing participants. The credible performance measurements are guaranteed by the working principles of this software we developed for HDD testing. The main idea of FC-Test is to measure the time the hard disk drives need to create (write), read and copy file sets, which differ from one another by the type, size and number of files. Then we calculate the practical performance of the drive basing on the time measurements.

As you remember from our previous HDD reviews, Windows and Programs patterns include a large number of smaller files, and the remaining three patterns – ISO, MP3 and Install – work with a limited number of larger files. For copy operations each drive is formatted into two 20GB equal logical partitions. The patterns are copied either within the same partition or from one partition to another.

At first we will consider the results obtained in NTFS file system. The first diagram shows how much times its takes to create (write) files on the drive. Here the results of both testing participants are kind of close, with Lacie being just a tiny bit ahead.

File reading is not the best task for WD Passport: it is falling behind the opponent in all patterns.

Copy near, i.e. when the files are copied within the same logical partition, the solution from Western Digital dashes ahead. This victory is indisputable in all patterns, and especially in ISO.

The situation is very similar to what we have just seen on the previous diagram. WD Passport is again ahead of the rival.