Three External (And Fast) USB 3.0 Drives Compared

Test Details, Test Setup and Comparison Table

Test Details

We ran several benchmarks for storage testing, including c’t Magazine’s h2benchw benchmark for throughput testing and Iometer for I/O performance. However, we decided to add a few more tests that reflect everyday usage, so we created batch scripts that copy a certain number of JPEGs, MP3s, and small text files. We tested read and write speeds and used Microsoft’s Robocopy utility, which comes with Windows Vista and 7. Last but not least, we used IOMeter to test average combined throughput if the drives have to read and write concurrently.

Copy Workloads:

Images (JPEG and RAW files), 2.01 GB (2,167,562,240 bytes), 790 files, 1 folder
Music (MP3 and WAV files), 2.00 GB (2,149,851,136 bytes), 356 files, 33 folders
Small files (TXT, XLS, DOC files), 395 MB (414,482,432 bytes), 22,704 files, 2,167 folders

We used an IODrive from FusionIO to avoid any bottlenecks in the copy testing.

Test Setup