Benchmark Results: Access Time And I/O Performance
Among today's three contenders, access times vary by only seven milliseconds. That's small enough to not affect the test results by much.
There is a notable performance difference between the Hitachi drive, on one hand, and the Adata and Western Digital drives, on the other. The Iometer benchmarks demonstrate this. In the file server and Web server workloads, Hitachi's Touro Mobile Pro outclasses its competition. Adata's DashDrive Durable HD710 and Western Digital's My Passport occupy a lower performance echelon, finishing close together and challenging each other for second place among our three candidates.
Despite the Touro's strong showing in these two charts, however, the results are only marginally relevant. External USB 3.0-based disk drives aren't designed for I/O-heavy tasks. So, it's less likely that you'd replicate these numbers than the sequential benchmark figures on the previous page.
Real-world results would be even better. On the next page, we'll dig into what these drives are really meant to do: copying files.
