by Aleksey Meyev
02/27/2008 | 09:51 AM
Mobile storage devices are still in our focus and this review is about 160GB models based on 2.5” hard disk drives. It is not a record-breaking capacity as there are 250GB (for details see our article called Roundup: Five 2.5-Inch Hard Disk Drives with 250GB Storage Capacity) and 300GB models available, with two and three platters, respectively, and Western Digital has recently announced a WD Passport with a capacity of 320GB.
160GB external storage devices are popular today. Such drives are considerably cheaper than those with larger capacities, and they are superior to 80GB and 120GB models in terms of price/capacity ratio.
Let’s take a closer look at each of our testing participants.
The black glossy case of the HandyDrive from Fujitsu looks cute but you should be aware that such a surface is going to be eventually covered with a web of tiny scratches. The included pouch should provide some protection against that, yet I wouldn’t count on it much.
The mini-USB and power connectors (you’ll need an additional power supply if your PC cannot provide a necessary current via the USB) are each closed with covers. No power adapter is included into the kit, though. Instead it, there is a cord for powering the device from a second USB port. Telling you the truth, I didn’t use even it during my tests. Otherwise, the box contains just a minimum of accessories: a brief user manual, a USB cord, and a disc with an electronic version of the user manual.
Although Maxtor was bought up by Seagate, its name has not yet been forgotten. The Maxtor OneTouch III looks like an average external storage based on a 2.5” HDD. There is nothing extraordinary about the accessories which are a USB cable and a brief user manual. There is a connector for a power adapter in the device’s case, but no adapter or USB power cord is included. The main USB cable has and additional connector you can plug into a second USB port if one port cannot provide enough power to the drive.
This is yet another product from Seagate, this time under its own brand. The descriptive name of the device sounds somewhat odd to me. As for the design and accessories, it only differs from the Maxtor OneTouch III externally but has the same connectors and the same way of attaching additional power. So, Seagate offers you the choice between a gray case with black sides and a black case with gray sides.
The Teac HD-15 PUS is somewhat more interesting because it is equipped with an eSATA interface besides USB. The eSATA interface doesn’t provide power to the attached device, and there is no power adapter in the box. The connector in the device’s case has a non-standard polarity: the minus corresponds to the central pin while the plus, to the external pin, while usually it’s exactly the opposite. The solution is indicated in the user manual. When the drive is connected via eSATA, you can power it up by means of the USB using the appropriate cord. There is a neat pouch included into the box but the lack of an eSATA cord is a bit disappointing.
The Teac HD-15 PUK-B is a silver-colored aluminum box with a mini-USB connector. Additional power is not provided for but I had no problems with powering the drive up during my tests. The drive comes with a USB cord and a pouch.
The Toshiba PX1270E-1G16 differs from the other drives with its illumination. It’s got a very bright white LED while the other makers prefer blue or green indicators. Otherwise, it has a rather plain gray case with two connectors (mini-USB and power). The accessories are scanty: a USB cable (with additional power supply from a second port), a user manual and a disc with an electronic version of the user manual.
The Transcend TS160GSJ25B is a larger-capacity version of the StoreJet drive we have reviewed already. It differs from the other drives with its shape and color. The drive has a USB port and a power connector. Its accessories include a user manual, a disc, and a USB cable with additional power supply from a second USB port.
Today we would like to introduce to you two ZIV products that are manufactured by a Russian company called Inprice. Although hard disk drives and controller chips are obviously third party solutions, everything else is claimed to be made in Russia. Let’s take a closer look at these products, as they have some unique design features that are pretty competitive and worth pointing out.
This device doesn’t differ much from others of its class. The metallic case will protect the HDD against any possible hardships while the lack of polish on the surface means that the drive won’t get covered with scratches after a while. The drive doesn’t need additional power other than it gets from the USB port. A special cable is included with it that allows powering the HDD up from two USB ports at once. The user manual is very accurate and even describes the connection of the drive to a PC running Linux (this operation is simple, though, because all modern Linux cores easily work with devices that support USB Mass Storage mode).
The drive comes with the following software:
This is quite a generous software bundle but it has a negative effect on the drive’s price which is somewhat higher than that of its competitors.
Let’s see what’s inside it:
The PCB carries a Jmicron JM20337 chip that can often be seen in such devices. A wire loop is soldered right to the PCB: it sticks out of the case for attaching a wear strap. A piece of rubber pipe ensures the position of the HDD in the case, but the case is tight-fitting anyway.
By the way, the ZIV 2 resembles the Agestar IUB201 model.
The ZIV Pro is somewhat thicker than the previous model. Its case has a more interesting shape that betrays a designer’s hand. Besides USB, the ZIV Pro offers a FireWire interface. The accessories are the same as you get with a ZIV 2: a cable for powering the drive from two USB ports and a disk with the software bundle.
A special feature of this model, the HDD is enveloped into a rubber pouch which should protect it against shocks. I didn’t throw the drive at walls or something to check this protection out, but it’s good to have it anyway.
The following testing utilities were used:
Testbed configuration:
I installed the generic OS drivers for the drives and formatted them in FAT32 and NTFS as one partition with the default cluster size. For some tests 32GB partitions were created on the drives and formatted in FAT32 and NTFS with the default cluster size, too. The eSATA interface was provided by a Promise SATA300 TX4302 controller.
IOMeter is sending a stream of read and write requests with a request queue depth of 4. The size of the requested data block is changed each minute, so that we could see the dependence of the drive’s sequential read/write speed on the size of the data block. This test is indicative of the highest speed the drive can achieve.
There are too many data, so I built two diagrams sorted according to the maximum speed. The result of the Teac HD-15 PUS connected via eSATA is impressive, of course. It is far above the others having the highest maximum speed (over 40MB/s) and achieving that speed on very small data blocks. The drives with a USB interface (including the same HD-15 PUS but connected via USB) have similar results achieving their maximum speed on 64KB data blocks but the eSATA interface provides such speed as soon as 2KB blocks. That’s an excellent result indeed. The ZIV Pro performs well with its FireWire interface, yet the difference between the two interfaces of this drive is small. So, the best interface is obvious here even though the HDD employed may have affected performance.
As for the USB-interfaced drives, the Teac HD-15 PUK-B is the best one among them, its speed being considerably higher than 30MB/s. The Toshiba PX1270E-1G16 and the Teac HD-15 PUS (connected via USB) are the slowest in this test.
The eSATA interface enjoys an even bigger lead when writing: over 10MB/s on large data blocks and 20MB/s and more on 2-16KB data blocks. The FireWire interface, on the contrary, loses its ground, its max speed being but slightly higher than the results of the best USB-interfaced products such as the Transcend TS160GSJ25B, Toshiba PX1270E-1G16 and Teac HD-15 PUK-B. This small difference can be observed on large data blocks only, though. The FireWire-connected ZIV Pro is still far faster on medium data blocks.
The other drives have similar speeds except for the Fujitsu HandyDrive whose graph shows sudden slowdowns. Its controller has problems with data blocks of certain sizes.
In this test IOMeter is sending a stream of requests to read and write 512-byte data blocks with a request queue of 1 for 10 minutes. The total number of requests processed by the HDD is over 60 thousand, so we get a sustained response time that doesn’t depend on the HDD’s buffer size. The results are sorted by read response time.
The Seagate and the Maxtor OneTouch III have the best response at reading. These two brands belong to the same company now and the drives are likely to have identical HDDs inside. I will check out this supposition in the next test that depends heavily on the HDD model. Note also that these two HDDs also have the worst response time at writing.
As for the influence of the interface, it is easy to see that the Teac HD-15 delivers similar performance with both USB and eSATA. The FireWire-connected ZIV Pro has a smaller read response but also a considerably higher write response than when it is connected via USB.
In the Database pattern the drive is processing a stream of requests to read and write 8KB random-address data blocks. The ratio of read to write requests is changing from 0% to 100% throughout the test while the request queue size varies from 1 to 256.
I built diagrams for each of the drives.
The drive shows good scalability of performance depending on the request queue depth. The deferred write algorithms do their job here. There is nothing extraordinary in this diagram overall.
Easy to see, the graphs of these two drives are almost identical. It means that they both have identical HDDs, obviously with a Seagate logo, inside. Note that the right part of the graphs is almost flat, indicating a lower efficiency of the deferred write algorithms in comparison with the previous drive.
The Teac HD-15 PUK-B cannot boast efficient deferred writing, either.
Note how different the left parts of the graphs are while the right parts are similar. It is an example of the reordering of read and write requests by means of NCQ technology and of the benefits it provides. Of course, this is not an ideal performance because there is but a small increase in the middle part of the diagram (when there is the same share of reads and writes in the queue), yet the effect of NCQ is visible.
The drives from Toshiba and Transcend seem to be based on the same HDD as the Teac HD-15 PUS: they have normal deferred writing and no reordering of read requests.
The firmware or the USB controller of the ZIV 2 is somewhat less efficient, but the overall shape of the graphs is normal.
Note the sudden slumps in the graphs which are strong with the USB interface and almost imperceptible with FireWire. This must be due to some flaws in the operation of the USB controller of that drive. The question is if these flaws show up in the synthetic test only or in real-life applications as well.
The multi-threaded tests simulate a situation when there are one to four clients accessing the hard disk at the same time. The depth of the outgoing request queue is varied from 1 to 8. We’ll discuss diagrams for a request queue of 1 as the most illustrative ones. When the queue is longer, the speeds depend but little on the number of applications.
You can follow the links below for numeric data and a diagram with more threads:
Multi-threaded reading has always been a hard test. Two simultaneous threads is already enough for the HDD to slow down. More threads don’t affect the drive’s performance much after that. The interface bandwidth is not important anymore but the firmware of the HDD affects performance greatly like in the Database test. In this test session, the Fujitsu HandyDrive, ZIV 2 and ZIV Pro cope best with the load as their speed lowers less than twofold.
Note that the Teac HD-15 PUS with a eSATA interface and the ZIV Pro with a FireWire interface have higher speeds with two threads than when connected via USB. It is because eSATA and FireWire offer better capabilities for processing the request queue.
The Seagate and Maxtor have poor results as their speed plummets sixfold.
The Teac HD-15 PUS with an eSATA interface is the only drive to suffer a noticeable performance hit when writing several threads. This doesn’t prevent it from becoming the leader, though. The ZIV Pro with a FireWire interface should be noted as it accelerates by 2MB/s when writing two threads. The ZIV 2 is the only drive to slow down here, excepting the leader.
This group of tests simulates disk loads typical of servers and workstations. Such applications are not typical for mobile devices, so I won’t analyze the results deeply. The names of the patterns are self-explanatory.
The Workstation pattern is used with the full capacity of the drive as well as with a 32GB partition. The request queue is limited to 32 requests in the Workstation pattern.
The results are presented as performance ratings which are calculated by the following formulas:
Rating (File-Server) = Total I/O (queue=1)/1 + Total I/O (queue=4)/2 + Total I/O (queue=16)/4 + Total I/O (queue=64)/6 + Total I/O (queue=256)/8
Rating (Web-Server) = Total I/O (queue=1)/1 + Total I/O (queue=4)/1 + Total I/O (queue=16)/2 + Total I/O (queue=64)/4 + Total I/O (queue=256)/6
Rating (Workstation) = Total I/O (queue=1)/1 + Total I/O (queue=2)/1 + Total I/O (queue=4)/2 + Total I/O (queue=8)/3 + Total I/O (queue=16)/4.
This test is won by the Teac HD-15 PUS which takes two first places when working on its eSATA and USB interfaces. The ZIV 2, Teac HD-15 PUK-B and ZIV Pro (curiously enough, this drive has almost identical results on both interfaces) and the Fujitsu HandyDrive are the losers.
Just like in the previous test, the hard disk drive installed into the external solution has the biggest effect on the performance here. In this case small access time during reading brings the victory to Seagate and Maxtor solutions. The losers here are both solutions from ZIV, TEAC HD-15 PUK-B and Fujitsu HandyDrive.
The Teac HD-15 PUS takes first places with its two interfaces again. It is closely followed by the drives from Transcend and Toshiba. Last places are occupied by the ZIV 2, the USB-connected ZIV Pro, and the Teac HD-15 PUK-B.
There are but minor changes at the bottom of the table when the test zone is reduced to 32GB. The Maxtor has replaced the ZIV Pro among the outsiders. The Teac HD-15 PUS with both its interfaces is in the lead, followed by the drives from Transcend and Toshiba.
First, you can have a look at the surface read speed graphs of the drives:
The eSATA interface is the only one that draws the same sloping data-transfer diagram that is typical of HDDs attached directly to the controller. The USB interface obviously limits the HDD’s performance as indicated by the flat stretch of the graph – some of the graphs even go up somewhat due to the specifics of the devices’ controllers. The FireWire interface provides higher bandwidth, yet it is still not high enough to fully reveal the potential of a modern 2.5” HDD.
The data-transfer speed at the end of the disk (the slowest area of the disk space) depends mostly on the specific HDD model (soon the USB bandwidth is not going to be enough even at that point, though) while the speed at the beginning is limited by the interface. The USB interface has long become a bottleneck as you can see comparing the results of the Teac HD-15 PUS connected via its different interfaces. Among the USB-interfaced drives the Teac HD-15 PUK is considerably faster than the others. The Toshiba PX1270E-1G16 is the worst drive in this test.
Now I will compare the results of the drives in the integral tests of WinBench 99. The Seagate and Maxtor did not take part in this test due to technical reasons. A 32GB partition is created on the drive and formatted in FAT32:
For more detailed FAT32 results click here.
The eSATA interface is superior to the others (it is about two times as fast as the others in Business Disk WinMark 99). The FireWire-connected ZIV Pro is second just as you could have expected. When attached via USB, these two drives take last places while the best drives with a USB interface are the Teac HD-15 PUK-B and Fujitsu HandyDrive.
For more detailed NTFS results click here.
We’ve got the same leader here, and its advantage in Business Disk WinMark 99 has become even larger. The second place goes to the Teac HD-15 PUK-B that has pushed the FireWire-connected ZIV Pro to third place, but the difference is small between them. The USB-connected Teac HD-15 PUS is the slowest drive among the USB models.
Now we will check performance of the hard disk drives with the FC-Test program. Two 32GB partitions are created on the drives and formatted in NTFS and then in FAT32. After that a file-set is created of the hard disk. It is then read from the disk, copied within the same partition and then copied into another partition. The time taken to perform these operations is measured and the speed of the drive is calculated.
To remind you, the Windows and Programs file-sets consist of a large number of small files whereas the other three patterns (ISO, MP3, and Install) include a few large files each.
This test produces too much data, so I will only discuss the results of the MP3, ISO and Install patterns which illustrate the most characteristic use of external HDDs. You can find the diagrams for the remaining two patterns by following the links below.
FAT32 results come first.
Results in the Windows and Programs patterns are available here.
The Teac HD-15 PUS with the eSATA interface is in the lead again. It is followed by the FireWire-interfaced ZIV Pro. The losers are also obvious: these are the Seagate and the Maxtor OneTouch III. I cannot single out any drive among the others because some of them cope better with large files while the others, with small files.
Results in the Windows and Programs patterns are available here.
We’ve got the same leaders again: the Teac HD-15 PUS with the eSATA interface and the ZIV Pro with FireWire. The latter is faster than any USB-interfaced drive irrespective of the file-set. As for the losers, the Seagate and the Maxtor OneTouch III are again the slowest with small files. The Teac HD-15 PUS with the USB interface and the drives from Toshiba and Fujitsu have the worst results with large files. The Teac HD-15 PUK-B and the USB-interfaced ZIV Pro are the leaders among the HDDs with a USB interface at processing every file-set.
Results in the Windows and Programs patterns are available here.
When copying within the same partition, the results depend on the specific file-set. Well, the eSATA and FireWire interfaces are still in the lead, but the Teac HD-15 PUK-B is close behind them in the Install pattern, and the USB-interfaced ZIV Pro isn’t much slower, either. The Toshiba, Transcend and the USB-interfaced Teac HD-15 PUS are on the losing side, again.
Results in the Windows and Programs patterns are available here.
When copying from one partition into another, the Teac HD-15 PUK-B delivers excellent performance, being in the top three and even matching the eSATA-interfaced model. When connected via USB, the Teac HD-15 PUS is one of the slowest drives, probably due to low performance of its SATA-USB controller. The HDDs from Transcend and Toshiba are slow, too.
Now I’ll perform the same tests in NTFS.
Results in the Windows and Programs patterns are available here.
The results of the writing test are similar to what we’ve seen in FAT32. The eSATA-interfaced model isn’t far ahead the others, though, except for the ISO pattern. The Maxtor and Seagate lose the writing test again.
Results in the Windows and Programs patterns are available here.
The Teac HD-15 PUS is still unrivalled with the eSATA interface and rather slow when connected via USB. The FireWire-connected ZIV Pro delivers high performance again. The Teac HD-15 PUK-B is the best one among the USB models. The Seagate, Maxtor and Toshiba are the slowest drives here.
Results in the Windows and Programs patterns are available here.
The leading trio doesn’t change. The Toshiba and Transcend are again the worst drives at copying. The Seagate and Maxtor have surprisingly high speeds of copying large files.
Results in the Windows and Programs patterns are available here.
It’s overall the same as in NTFS except that the Seagate and Maxtor have rather high speeds.
This test session has proved again that modern external storage devices based on 2.5” HDDs are not satisfied with the bandwidth provided by the USB interface. If you need a really high speed, you should consider devices with an eSATA interface in the first place. If this interface doesn’t suit you for some reason (for example, your PC doesn’t have it and you don’t want to buy an appropriate expansion card), look for models with a FireWire port.
The interface is important, yet not everything. The characteristics of the HDD installed in the external storage device are important, too. The HDD’s firmware algorithms affect performance greatly as you could see with Teac’s products: the USB model would occasionally overtake the eSATA one.
As for the specific drives I have tested today, both models from Teac have performed well, especially the eSATA-interfaced HD-15 PUS. The simpler HD-15 PUK-B was always among the fastest USB-interfaced models.
The ZIV Pro must be pointed out, too. Of course, FireWire is slower than eSATA, but it is more widespread, especially in notebooks. It usually ensures a much higher speed than the USB interface.
The Seagate Portable External Hard Drive and the Maxtor OneTouch II disappointed us this time. The slow performance of these models seems to be caused by the HDD installed in them. The drives from Toshiba and Transcend would often find themselves in last places, too.
We’ll be informing you about new external drives with larger capacities and, hopefully, with faster interfaces – USB 3.0 is expected to bring about a tenfold performance boost!