Conclusion

Now it’s time to sum up the results. There were no surprises, actually. Modern external hard disk drives are limited by the bandwidth of the USB interface. It is only with a faster interface, e.g. with eSATA, that you can reveal the full potential of a 2.5-inch hard disk drive. Therefore the leaders of this test session are the drives from Teac. Thanks to eSATA they were faster than their USB-connected opponents even though they are based on 4200rpm rather than 5400 hard disks as the rest of the tested external HDDs. There is only one inconvenience about the current implementation of eSATA. This interface doesn’t provide power to the external device via the interface cable. You have to power the drive up by an external power adapter or, rather absurdly, by a USB cable. Hopefully, the next update of the eSATA standard will solve this problem.

If you want to use a USB drive for some reason, there is no difference in speed between them. Your choice should be based on such subjective characteristics and exterior design and ergonomics. The Fujitsu HandyDrive 300GB was somewhat slower than the others due to its 4200rpm hard disk, though. It’s up to you to decide if the extra 50 gigabytes of storage space make up for the 10% reduction in speed. Generally speaking, external HDDs with USB interface have stopped to progress. Although the capacity and speed of hard disk drives proper has been growing up, the interface bandwidth is still about 30MBps.

We’d like to specifically note the high performance of the Transcend drive at copying which is due to the Samsung disk it has inside.