by Aleksey Meyev
08/29/2007 | 12:56 PM
Most users are used to the fact that hard disk drives are relatively large rectangular devices that can store large amounts of data. Even external 2.5-inch storage solutions that have already become pretty widely spread and recently announced 1.8-inch models are much larger than flash drives in terms of physical size as well as storage capacity.
<%BANNER[article]%>I am sure that some of you remember such storage solutions as IBM Microdrive – these hard disk drives built with 1” platters were pretty popular among professional photographers sometime ago. They featured the same pinout and physical dimensions as Compact Flash cards, but boasted larger storage capacity and cost slightly less, though their data transfer rate and power consumption levels were just a little behind those of the CF cards. If you would like to learn more about the development of storage solutions, I suggest that you check out our old article called 1GB Compact Flash Media Review devoted to the very first solutions with 1GB storage capacity.
However, this is history already: IBM is no longer manufacturing hard disk drives having sold the corresponding division to Hitachi. The latter, however, is still making storage drives in this form-factor, but they are not as popular as they used to be anymore, since compact flash cards have already hit the same storage capacities and improved their performance dramatically.
So, what did bring back all these memories? In fact, we got our hands on a pretty funky-looking external storage device with USB interface – Seagate USB Pocket Hard Drive built on a 1” hard drive with 8GB storage capacity. The size of this device is very close to that of a USB flash drive, therefore we decided to see which one would be a winner this time in the race between flash-drives and hard disk drives.
Unlike storage solutions built with larger diameter hard drives that usually come packed in carton boxes, Seagate USB Pocket Hard Drive sits in transparent plastic package. Of course, flash drives usually come in smaller packages, but the similarity is undeniable:
The storage solution looks pretty unusual: it is a very “chubby” hard drive in silver plastic casing, weighing 62.4g, 80mm in diameter and 18mm high. The USB connector on a short cable is designed very unusually, too: rotating the cylindrical part of the hard drive inside the casing you can either hide the connector completely, or locate it opposite the casing slot. As a result, if you unlock the connector and rotate the drive a little more, you will get a 12cm long cable with a USB plug on the end. On the one hand, this may seem a pretty short cable, but on the other, you can hide it inside the hard drive casing completely and do not need to carry an additional USB cable together with your drive, which is very convenient for mobile solutions. Besides, it would be very hard to actually connect this hard drive to a USB port without a cable, as it is still larger than a traditional USB flash drive.
In the center of the spherical drive there are large operation status indicators.
The manufacturer was pretty brief when listing the specifications of the drive: inside there is a hard drive with 1” platters rotating at 3600rpm. The buffer is 2MB big.
The accessories bundle is pretty modest. The drive comes with a user’s manual and a CD disk wit two brand name applications. One of them is DiskWizard – a universal utility for Seagate hard disk drives.
The utility offers the following options: working with partitions (create, format, delete), file copying, creating diskettes with DiskWizard Starter Edition and SeaTools, performing drive self-test, setting SCSI devices.
There is a chance that someone may need these functions, but most users (especially those who have only one USB Pocket Hard Drive from Seagate) will most likely only use the drive self-test feature. All other operations can be more conveniently performed with standard Windows options, especially since Seagate DiskWizard is pretty slow overall. It takes about a minute to load, about 10 seconds on average to switch between tabs, and its interface, actually, leaves much to be desired.
The second application supplied with the drive is Pocket Hard Drive Toolkit – a small application that automatically minimizes into the tray icon upon OS boot-up. It is designed specifically for this hard drive series. It helps to create a password protected secure zone, allows adjusting partition sizes, creating a boot disk or formatting it if necessary.
To create a secure password protected zone, you have to select “Manage Partition” item in the “Tools” tab. With a slider you can determine how big this zone is going to be in relation to the entire HDD storage capacity. And after that you should go to “Security” tab where you check “Enable Write Protect” function and set the password.
For our tests we used the following applications:
We used two versions of our FC-Test benchmark on purpose. We would like to ease the transition to the new FC-Test version by offering you the opportunity to compare the results of the previously tested solutions with the results of the new ones.
Since this device has no analogues so far, and it wouldn’t be absolutely fair and correct to compare it against solutions of larger form-factor, we decided to compare it against a contemporary flash drive of identical storage capacity. We decided on the Corsair Flash Voyager 8GB that we have already tested before in our article called Roundup of USB Flash Drives with 4GB+ Storage Capacity. It is not the fastest flash drive, more of a mainstream solution, but it boasts identical storage capacity as the Seagate USB Pocket Hard Drive: 8GB.
As always we would like to start with the results of synthetic Intel IOMeter testing suite.
Let’s compare the results obtained during sequential reading and writing of 512Byte-1MB data blocks for each device:
In the left part of the write speed diagrams the testing participants run almost neck and neck and with 4KB data blocks Seagate Pocket Drive even takes the lead leaving the rival 1.4MB/s behind. However, starting with 16KB data blocks and up it lets the Corsair Flash Voyager drive get ahead. The “sphere” freezes at 9.3MB/s level: the hard disk drive inside it cannot do any better than that.
During reading, the hard drive falls even farther behind the flash drive. At soon as the data block size reaches 8KB, Seagate Pocket Hard Drive reaches its maximum speed of the same 9.3MB/s. As for the Corsair Flash Voyager, its read speed keeps increasing up to 30MB/s with the growth of the data block size.
Almost twice as fast during writing and three times as fast during reading! This is an indisputable victory of the USB flash drive.
Now let’s check out the results during random reading and writing. We’ll evaluate the speed of random read and write operations by measuring the time the drives take to perform them. The data block size is varied from 0.5 to 32768KB in this test.
Unfortunately, the Seagate hard drive cannot boast much here: no matter how big the data block is, it is almost three times slower than Corsair Flash Voyager during random writing.
As we move on to reading, the gap between the flash drive and the pocket hard disk drive increases even more. During reading of large data blocks, the performance differs 4 times, while with smaller data blocks, the USB flash drive turns out up to 20 times faster. Wow! Very impressive, especially since most operations storage devices perform deal with small data blocks.
In conclusion to our synthetic testing we are going to measure the average response time of our testing participants during random sector reading and writing. The average read/write response time is measured in a 10-minute test to read/write 512-byte data blocks at a request queue of 1.
As you may have already expected, Seagate USB Pocket Hard Drive demonstrated longer average response time than Corsair Flash Voyager during both: reading and writing.
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.
Now let’s take a look at the results obtained in the second version of FC-Test according to the same testing methodology as in the previous case.
In the second version of FC-Test the situation suddenly changes. Seagate USB Pocket Hard Drive manages to outperform Corsair Flash Voyager when working with 1MB files. Compared with the previous test version, the hard drive writes twice as fast, while the flash drive, on the contrary, works somewhat slower. However, as the files grow bigger, the situation starts looking more familiar: with 10MB files, the flash drive is already ahead of the Seagate solution, while with 100MB files gets five times faster than the rival. Note that, Seagate USB Pocket Hard Drive works almost equally fast with 1MB and 10MB files, while the 100MB file is written at half the speed.
The version of the test didn’t have any effect on the read speed: the flash drive reads files 3.5 times faster than the Seagate drive, no matter how big or small they are.
I have to admit that the results are not very pleasing for the Seagate USB Pocket Hard Drive. Very nice and convenient exterior design cannot make up for the performance difference compared with a regular contemporary USB flash drive. Some time ago there was at least some parity between hard disk drives and flash drives with the same storage capacity. Now, however, we have every right to state that hard disk drives have lost this battle.
Rapid development and production growth of new flash memory chips made these storage solutions faster, more reliable, cheaper, smaller in size and at least comparable with the hard drives in terms of storage capacity. Times change, and it looks like there is hardly a niche in the market these days for hard disk drives on 1” platters. Some additional features, unavailable on flash drives, could have saved them, but there are none – contemporary USB flash drives know to create secure zones and function as a boot-up device already.