Three External (And Fast) USB 3.0 Drives Compared
The first USB 3.0-based external hard drives aim at eliminating the USB 2.0 bottleneck (that hovered around 30 MB/s) with enough bandwidth to outperform the fastest mechanical disks. A-Data, Buffalo, and WD do battle for maximum performance.
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
System Hardware | |
---|---|
Hardware | Details |
CPU | Intel Core i7-920 (45 nm, 2.66 GHz, 8MB Shared L3 Cache) |
Motherboard (Socket 1366) | Supermicro X8SAX, Revision: 1.0, Chipset Intel X58 + ICH10R, BIOS: 1.0B |
RAM | 3 x 1GB DDR3-1333 Corsair CM3X1024-1333C9DHX |
HDD | Seagate NL35 400 GB, ST3400832NS, 7200 RPM, SATA 1.5Gb/s, 8 MB Cache |
Storage Controllers | eSATA: on-board eSATA (ICH10R) USB 2.0: on-board USB 2.0 (ICH10R) USB 3.0: NEC D720200F1 (Gigabyte GA-USB3.0) |
Power Supply | OCZ EliteXstream 800 W, OCZ800EXS-EU |
Benchmarks | |
Performance Measurements | h2benchw 3.13 |
I/O Performance | Iometer 2008.08.18Fileserver-BenchmarkWebserver-BenchmarkDatabase-BenchmarkWorkstation-BenchmarkStreaming Reads and Writes |
System software & Drivers | |
Operating System | Windows 7 Ultimate |
Manufacturer | A-Data | Buffalo | Western Digital |
---|---|---|---|
Family | Nobility Series | HD-PEU3 | My Book 3.0 |
Model Number | NH01 | HD-PE500U3 | WDBABP0010HCH |
Capacity | 500 GB | 500 GB | 1000 GB |
Other Capacities | 320 GB, 640 GB | 640 GB | 2000 GB |
Form Factor | 2.5" | 2.5" | 3.5" |
Interface | USB 3.0 | USB 3.0 | USB 3.0 |
Weight | 194 g | 182 g | 900 g |
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