Three More External USB 3.0 Drives Benchmarked

Features
By
Published

Another trio of SuperSpeed USB 3.0 drives landed in our German lab recently. As some of the contenders we've benchmarked underperform compared to our expectations, it’s quite clear that hard drive speed matters again, now that we've moved beyond USB 2.0.

Comparison Table And Test Setup

Comparison Table

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Manufacturer PQI Samsung Transcend
Family H566 Story Station 3.0 StoreJet 25M3
Model Number Row 1 - Cell 1 HX-DT020EB TS500GSJ25M3
Capacity 320 GB 2000 GB 500 GB
Other Capacities 500, 640 GB 1000, 1500 GB 640 GB
Form Factor 2.5" 3.5" 2.5"
Interface USB 3.0 USB 3.0 USB 3.0
Weight 184 g 952 g 202 g

Test Setup

Swipe to scroll horizontally
System Hardware
Hardware Detail
CPU Intel Core i7-920 (45 nm, 2.66 GHz, 8 MB Shared L3 Cache)
Motherboard (Socket 1366) Supermicro X8SAX, Revision: 1.0, Chipset Intel X58 + ICH10R, BIOS: 1.0B
RAM 3 x 1 GB DDR3-1333 Corsair CM3X1024-1333C9DHX
HDD Seagate NL35 400 GB, ST3400832NS, 7200 RPM, SATA 1.5Gb/s, 8 MB Cache
Storage Controllers eSATA: onboard eSATA (ICH10R) USB 2.0: onboard 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 and Drivers
Operating System Windows 7 Ultimate