Results: Transfer Diagrams And Access Time
The Buffalo Mini Station Turbo USB 500 GB is one of the fastest portable USB 2.0 storage solutions, providing 33 MB/s read throughput on average and almost 27 MB/s write performance. However, USB 2.0 is a bottleneck, as all modern 2.5” hard drives reach at least 60 MB/s today.
The Toshiba Portable External Hard Drive averages around 30 MB/s read throughput and 27 MB/s write performance. Again, a faster interface would result in a diagram that starts at 60 MB/s and drops to around 35 MB/s towards the end of the medium.
Access time isn’t really an issue over USB, since the interface generates some overhead as well. However, the Toshiba drive is quicker, which matches the test results from our last 500 GB notebook hard drive roundup : these devices store a lot of data, but they aren’t quick to access it.