by Nikita Nikolaichev
07/03/2003 | 05:33 AM
Having launched a hard disk drive of the largest storage capacity, which has also proven to be the today’s fastest solution (see our review called Western Digital WD2500JB HDD: More than Drivezilla?!), Western Digital Company decided not to take any rest and introduced the today’s largest (in terms of storage capacity) external HDD – WD 250GB Special Edition Combo Drive.
The word “Combo” is mentioned in its name not for nothing. It implies that the drive is equipped with two types of interfaces: FireWire and USB 2.0. Before that, WD equipped its external HDDs only with one of these interfaces: with USB 2.0 or with FireWire, which definitely made them less attractive for the customers. Unfortunately, FireWire interface (IEEE 1394) didn’t become as popular in the PC market, as it did in the Apple platform, even though our tests showed that it is much more suitable for external hard disk drives (see our article called USB 2.0 against FireWire). However, now FireWire is winning the hearts of PC owners little by little. Of course, Apple’s decision to revise the FireWire devices licensing procedure told positively on the growing popularity of this interface.
But if we don’t focus our attention only on performance, we will see that USB interface is also very suitable for external HDDs. It makes these drives more mobile, so that they can be used for fast data exchange between different hardware platforms.
As for the drive’s storage capacity, we have no suggestions here. Those of you who deal with external HDDs know it very well that free space on the drive can never be too big. That is why we are very glad that Western Digital makes its external HDD models as big in terms of storage capacity as the desktop ones.
Well, now it’s high time you finally met our today’s hero!
As usual, we begin with the box, which is very colorful:
In this case I really wanted to say “Box” with the capital letter, because this BOX deserves special attention. First of all, it is a really big box. It is even not very convenient to hold. Secondly, it is a pretty heavy box, so you should feel really happy to get a real “thing” for your few banknotes. Thirdly, the box is very nicely designed and decorated.
But the disk drive is even cooler and more beautiful than the box. Have a look:
The matt casing of the previous models has been replaced with a fashionable “aquarium-like” design. A very successful combination of transparent and semi-transparent parts hides what should be hidden and sets off what is should be displayed. The only thing that made me feel a little uncomfortable, was a black sticker covering the standard label of all WD HDDs. Actually, I did know for sure that there is a Western Digital 2500JB hard drive inside the box, but I wish they left the label…
If we turn the beauty, we will see that half of the case is cut through with the holed for air better circulation. This external HDD model is equipped with a fan for forced HDD cooling. Besides, the hard drive is also cooled down passively: the air inside the plastic box heats up, rises and leaves the case through the holes in the side. Since the case cannot remain empty, the cold air is naturally sucked in from the bottom of the case. In fact, external HDDs overheating is a very serious problem: if the cooling is insufficient, the HDD will die very quickly. That is why I paid special attention to the thermal state of our HDD throughout the entire test session, and I am very happy to state that WD engineers did a great job: even under the heaviest workloads the drive felt well.
But the major trump of the new WD drive design can be seen only after you plug the power supply cable:
The drive got suddenly lit like a Christmas tree with all sorts of lights :)
There are two LEDs along the sides of the drive casing, which shine very exciting red. Together with the purple background light we get thrilling night-club atmosphere…
And this is the way this product looks at night:
Very nice, isn’t it? But as for me, I don’t feel like working at all when I look at this drive... But I have to, I have to work :)
The back panel of the drive carried the connectors for interface FireWire (two connectors, as the bus allows building up chains of devices) and USB 2.0 cables. Also there is a power supply connector. As you see, there is now power switch or button, and the drive powers up immediately, when we plug in the cable from a special PSU supplied together with the drive.
The testbed configuration looks as follows:
To test our WD drive with FireWire and USB 2.0 interfaces we used a PCI controller from SUNSWAY LIMITED:
As you can see, it carries both: a USB 2.0 chip from NEC and a FireWire controller from Agere. After we installed the drivers, the device manager recognized three new devices:
For a better comparison with our WD 250GB Special Edition Combo we used the results shown by WD2500JB.
The following software was used:
Before the tests the AAM register of all HDDs was set to OFF position (FAST mode) with the help of Hitachi Feature Tool Utility. For WinBench tests all the drives were formatted in FAT32 and NTFS as one logical drive with the default cluster (to format the drives in FAT32 we used Paragon Partition Manager utility). The tests were run seven times each, the maximum result was taken for the diagrams. The drives didn't cool down between the tests. The tests in Intel IOMeter were run in SequentialRead, SequentialWrite, DataBase, WorkStation, FileServer and WebServer patterns. If you are looking for the detailed description of these patterns, please, see our previous articles.
We will start our test session with the dependence of the linear read and write speeds on the data block size.
Just in case I would like to remind you that to measure the linear read and write speeds, we use a special pattern for IOMeter utility to send a set of read and write requests to the HDD. Note that the request queue depth is fixed and equals 4 outgoing requests. Once every 30 seconds we change the data block size. This way we get the dependence of the read or write speed on the data block size.
The results obtained with the help of the above described methodology are summed up in the table below (the data are in MB/sec):
Let’s compare the performance of three interfaces with the help of the diagrams below:
As you can see, the situation hardly became any different compared with what we saw last year (see our article called USB 2.0 against FireWire). ATA/100 interface is still beyond any competition, and USB 2.0 still yields to FireWire.
Now let’s check how efficient the controller drivers can cope with the read and write requests for random data blocks. Of course, the results for the DataBase pattern are not evident. You shouldn’t think however, that I am trying to push you to use USB 2.0 and FireWire drives as a solution for DataBase servers. I just want to see, how scalable the interface is depending on the requests queue depth and how greatly the requests processing speed depends on the writes share.
Well, nothing changed here. The ATA/100 interface is ahead of all. Then comes FireWire interface and the USB interface seems to be completely ignoring the requests queue depth increase.
Now let’s pass over to the patterns imitating the work of the hard disk drive in File- and WebServers.
Since the difference in interfaces performances doesn’t depend on the workload type that much, we decided to sum up these three patterns into one block:
All performance rating diagrams are very similar to one another.
As you see, the difference between the tested interfaces in WorkStation is minimal. Since the linear workload is more typical of a desktop PC (the outgoing requests queue is not very long), the drive connected to the USB 2.0 interface doesn’t look so slow, as in server patterns.
Now let’s check the HDD performance in desktop applications with the help of WinBench tests.
Hm, if the situation in Business Disk WinMark is somewhat similar to the rating in WorkStation pattern, in High End Disk WinMark the HDD with USB 2.0 interface appeared much slower than the other two. However, as the benchmark name indicates, this test implies very high workload onto the drives, and USB 2.0 is no competitor to ATA/100 or FireWire in this case.
Here are the linear read graphs for all cases considered:
The last benchmark we are going to consider today is the FC-test, which suits excellently for testing external solutions. It allows measuring the HDD performance in the tasks of primary importance: during reading, writing and copying files. You can read our article devoted to this test here for more details, and we are going to discuss the results now. The table below contains the results obtained from our HDD during reading, writing and copying in MB/sec:
Since the file system type doesn’t affect the results that much, we decided to discuss not all the diagrams in detail.
Here you can see the results for FAT32, because the HDD comes preformatted for this file system.
I assume that you can’t wait to ask how come that such a big 250GB HDD got formatted for FAT32, if the old fdisk.com doesn’t “recognize” HDDs with more than 64GB storage capacity (in reality, it simply doesn’t display their capacity correctly), and if it is impossible to format a HDD bigger than 32GB from Win2K/XP with the available means. Well, I will try to answer. There is the whole lot of wonderful utilities, which allow overcoming the artificial barrier created by Microsoft in the latest Windows versions (I prefer Paragon Partition Wizard, for instance).
Well, here are the diagrams with the results:
Now we can conclude that IEEE1394 (IFireWire) and USB 2.0 interfaces do yield a lot to the ATA/100 when working with the external HDD. Maybe it is all because of the IEE1394-to-ATA/100 and USB 2.0-to-ATA/100 converters used in the external hard disk drives, but I am more inclined to believe that the contemporary HDDs simply do not fit into the old interfaces. Maybe, FireWire800 will save the situation? Or maybe we should turn to SerialATA?
When we compared the results for USB 2.0 and FireWire interfaces, we understood that the latter provides better data transfer rate.
So, despite the fact that we actually knew the results of our tests in advance, I don’t regret having spent so much time on running all those benchmarks. Firstly, the external WD drive we have just tested appeared faster and better than the 120GB model, which we have reviewed a while ago (see our Western Digital External Hard Disk Drive Review). Secondly, we saw that USB 2.0 and FireWire interfaces, do not provide enough bandwidth for it, as the drive can work even faster. And thirdly, I tried to play with this drive for as long as possible, as I really fell in love with it :)
Well, now I would like to sum up everything I have already said:
Highs:
Lows:
In conclusion we would like to thank Western Digital for the opportunity to test this wonderful product.