SUMMARY: Seagate has decided to get in on the action with products catering for users with portable storage needs. Over the past few years we’ve seen the influx of portable storage devices such as pen drives which many of couldn’t do without in our day to day lives. Who doesn’t want 1 and 0’s in their pocket for convenience? Read on as we take a close look at both products and then put them through their paces and see just how they perform.
Processor(s): Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz (800MHz FSB) Motherboard(s): DFI LAN Party 865PE (ICH5R) Memory(s): Kingmax 2 x 512MB DDR-500 Video Card(s): ATI Radeon 9600XT 256MB AGP Hard Disk(s): Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 200GB PATA Operating System Used: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2
So, we know both devices from Seagate are quite funky and work well... but, how do they perform? To find out we’ve used HD Tach, a popular storage benchmark utility and File Copy Test moving 2.3GB worth of data, and compared both products (USB 2.0 and Firewire on the external drive) against a standard USB 2.0 pen drive and a slaved PATA system drive.
These results should give you a good indication of how well the 5GB pocket drive from Seagate performs against a regular pen drive and how the 400GB external unit performs against a hard drive inside your case connected to the IDE bus through the older Intel ICH5R south bridge.
HD Tach has been around for a long time and is excellent when it comes to testing hard drive performance. It is also a very handy program when it comes to testing the controller used on particular motherboards. Tests such as Read, CPU Utilization and Burst are available at a click of the button and give you a good idea of how the hard drive can perform from system to system.
We’ll start with average read speeds: We can clearly see that Firewire provides better performance than USB 2.0 by almost 8MB/s and the internal PATA drive is leading the pack about 17MB/s ahead of the Firewire external drive. Not to forget the 5GB pocket drive from Seagate that provides about a 35% increase in performance over a regular USB 2.0 pen drive.
Burst speeds show a similar story as average read speeds between USB 2.0 and Firewire but we can see the increased bandwidth of the IDE bus show its color well ahead of the external unit. The 5GB pocket drive really shines here killing the regular pen drive.
