Shootouts

750GB External HDD Storage Roundup

By Aloysius Low - 8 Dec 2007

Taking Them For a Drive

Ready Set Go! - Test Driving the Models

We tested the various external drives on our storage testbed which is based on an NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra platform running an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor. Our normal benchmarking programs were used: CrystalMark 2004R2 (v0.9.123.402), FutureMark's PCMark05 v1.20 and Winbench 99 v2.0.

Testing was mainly conducted on the USB 2.0 interface and we also tried out the FireWire 400 port of the Maxtor. We didn't test the eSATA interface formally on the Seagate drive as for the majority of the target user group, USB 2.0 is the by far the most accessible interface. eSATA has a long way to go before it is adopted by all drive manufacturers and users alike. In any case eSATA should provide transfer speeds far exceeding that of USB and FireWire. However on many of the early Seagate FreeAgent Pro drives such as our unit, eSATA transfer rates have been hobbled to 44MB/sec and that certainly showed up in our informal testing where eSATA performance was no better than that of USB 2.0. However Seagate is working on an eSATA firmware update and an early version of it is available on their site that should fix this issue. However we recommend that you wait for the finalized firmware update to materialize to stay on the safer side of things.


The Results

With the groundwork for testing taken care of, first up we have performance results from PCMark05. All units tested used the USB 2.0 interface as mentioned and while the results were pretty much the same overall, the Buffalo DriveStation's Turbo USB obviously showed a marked increase in performance as compared to the other models. Without the Turbo USB though, the results were pretty much the same all around. Maxtor's OneTouch 4 Plus was a reasonably performer on the USB front, but its FireWire 400 performance was unusually low. Despite the fact that FireWire has theoretically slower maximum throughput than USB 2.0, its overheads are lower and it is an interface that's designed for large continuous file transfers. As such from our past tests, the FireWire interface has usually turned out to be the better option, but on this Maxtor drive, stick to USB. CrystalMark too returned similar performance findings.

A simple Disk Access Test was done on all four models and the results showed the Seagate FreeAgent Pro lagging behind the others (again historically inline with our previous Seagate external HDD tests). Otherwise, the other models had very similar access times. The FireWire 400 interface on the Maxtor showed the best disk access times, but its advantage is far from recommendation when compared to its other read/write throughput results. As such, it is really a no-brainer to use the USB 2.0 port over the FireWire 400 port on the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus.

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