FC-Test (FAT32)

Our file-copy test is the last in the show. I hope you are already familiar with it. If not, please see this article for more details about this benchmark). The HDDs performance was measured with 5 preliminarily prepared file sets. The test names let you guess very easily which folder served as a prototype: Install, ISO, MP3, Programs and Windows.

Why do we use so many different files here? You may think it could be more than enough to take one big file or a few hundreds of small files to measure all the speeds. The matter is that we wanted to take the “real” HDD performance, that is how fast it works with the real and not synthetic files. Since hard disk drives from different manufacturers cope with files of different sizes not equally fast, we need quite a lot of files of the same size to be able to detect the HDD’s native inclination.

The new WD drive demonstrated a significant write speed growth compared with the WD2000JB, especially when working with large files. But still it couldn’t outpace the drive from Maxtor…

WD2500JB is also notably faster than WD2000JB at reading file sets. It even stepped on top of the podium in the ISO pattern.

The Maxtor drive is hard to compete with at copying files. WD2500JB can be considered a worthy rival to Maxtor and IBM only in case of large files.

At far-copying, WD2500JB suffers a greater performance drop than Maxtor. So, there is no competition even in the ISO pattern.