Thread: Storage performance

We tested these drives on a rig with the following specs: An ECS P45T Black Series motherboard, Intel QX9650 processor, Kingston Hyper DDR3 2GB RAM, and a Radeon 4870X2 graphics card. For bench- marking the drives compre¬hensively, we used Everest Ultimate 4.60 and HD Tune Pro. Our real-world bench¬marks comprised of trans¬ferring one single large file and a multiple file directory to and from the review drive. We also looked for transfer speeds between two partitions of these hard drives, as they tend to be lower than transferring data from one drive to another. What we inferred from the performance test is that there is very little to choose between the drives, as they are all bottlenecked by the USB interface which is slower compared to FireWire or SATA.

Talking of statistics, Sea¬gate FreeAgent came on top with our benchmark utility's random read and write speeds at 33.2MB/s and 32.9MB/s, respectively. The speed of other drives was nearly the same. Seagate's eSATA read/write speeds were better than WD's at 92.6MB/s and 89.7MB/s, respectively. But when it came to transferring files between partitions of the drive, over USB, the Buffalo Drive station excelled with a 15.2MB/s transfer rate. Buffalo and Iomega both have a Seagate drive in their casing, . while Verbatim uses a Samsung drive. Buffalo also deploys a Turbo USB mode which increases data transfer rates and works smooShly. We found a good 4-MB/s difference between the transfer speeds in Turbo.



USB mode and while it wasn't enabled. WD is unique in this comparison to have a FireWire 800 port found mostly on Macs, and not much on the radar of PCs. We tested the FireWire transfer speeds on the new MacBook Pro: read/ write transfer speeds were at 62.4MB/s and 57.4MB/s, respectively. These numbers are significantly greater than those of FireWire 400 transfer rates on the Seagate FreeAgent at 41.6MB/s. Since there isn't much to chose between the Seagate and WD in terms of performance alone, we think the My Book is a better choice for Mac users, overall.

Software
Not that there's a dearth of third-party software, but it is nice to see external hard drive manufacturers bundling in software utilities. They are mostly used for backing up of data from your computer, syncing data and even data encryption. None of the drives in this comparison support one-touch back¬up, but come with software that is readily installable from the drive. In this regard, Sea gate FreeAgent XTreme impressed us with the most comprehensive and easy-to-use software pack.

The moment you plug in the Seagate drive, the Seagate Manager Utility pops up for installation, and it sits in your taskbar. You will find a quick-installation guide if you fumble at any point, but it is all very easy to use. The backup utility lets you select folders on your computer, and you can even schedule the backups on a given day or time. The software also syncs data between the drive and any other PC or laptop. If you are worried about data security, Seagate also throws in an encryption tool. All you have to do is drag-and-drop a file into the application window, give a password and encrypt it. Similarly, drag them out to decrypt a file.

WD is pre-formatted for Mac and doesn't come with any Windows backup tools out of the box. Although, it does allow you to download the same from the website:
WDAnywhere Backup and Drive Manager. Buffalo DriveStation has the next best software accompani¬ment: a backup tool, encryption utility and Turbo USB for boosting transfer speed. Verbatim came with Nero BackItUp 2 Essentials, while Iomega disappointingly didn't come with any software bundle at all.

Conclusion
For all practical purposes, all these external drives are similar in terms of speed over the USB interface. If you need an inexpensive external 500GB drive, then look no further than Iomega priced attractively at Verbatim isn't worth the money, but Buffalo is very good if you're looking for a balance between performance and software bundle that adds value. At its price, it's the best USB-only drive in our comparison. But when you loek for faster interfaces like eSATA and FireWire, there was very close competition between Sea gate FreeAgent XTreme and Western Digital My Book Studio, and frankly both are very good. We think the WD is more appealing to a Mac user, and Seagate is best suited for a PC and offers the best overall package. Although, there is that nagging omission of the eSATA cable with both these brands, and we hope they fix it in the future.

thats nice.