by Aleksey Meyev
09/05/2007 | 02:31 PM
A hard disk drive cannot be too big. Very often we get to the point when we start thinking of getting a new storage solution, because the old one can no longer fit all the data that we need for comfortable living.
<%BANNER[article]%>Those who care most about mobility of their huge data volumes with immediate access to information at any time, need to pay special attention to the storage capacity of their hard disk drives. One of the options for those who need a portable solution with large storage capacity is the product we are going to talk about today: Western Digital Passport WD2500U017 that offers 250GB of storage space and is built with a 2.5-inch hard disk drive. It is true: perpendicular recording technology does work wonders: about half a year ago the maximum storage capacity of portable hard disk drives of this form-factor was almost half the size. Moreover, this storage capacity is quite enough even for a desktop 3.5” HDD these days.
External Western Digital Passport hard disk drives can hardly be confused with the competitors’ solutions: the black glossy casing standing out through the transparent plastic casing catches your eye right away.
Unfortunately, this rich design will not please you for long: the glossy surface catches scratches very easily, not to mention the oily fingerprints that will stick to it every time you touch the drive.
USB-connector on one of the sides is locked tightly with a rubber plug that is attached to the casing. This convenient and practical design ensures that the rubber plug won’t get lost. It also protects the connectors from dust.
Inside the storage device there is a WD2500BEVS hard disk drive. It is damped with rubber pads (four of them – the black squares on four corners of the HDD – are shown on the photo above). There is also an electronic PCB and an internal connector that are covered with protective foil screen.
The HDD power consumption arouses some questions. The sticker says that it is 0.55A, plus the IDE-USB adapter electronics consumes some power as well, so assume the HDD requires up to 0.6A. At the same time, the specification claim that a single USB-port workload shouldn’t exceed 0.5A, so WD Passport may experience some power consumption problems. It is especially acute for notebook owners, as the notebook USB ports sometimes cannot feed even USB devices requiring 0.4-0.5A.
The accessories bundle is minimal and includes only a brief user’s manual and a USB cable.
The device uses SATA-USB adapter made by Initio Company. However, we couldn’t find any information on the INIC 1605L micro-chip uses in Passport 250GB on the company’s web-site. They only have data for the newer INIC 1610 micro-chip modification there.
WD Sync software supplied with the Passport 250GB hard drive is exactly the same as the one supplied with the older solutions from the same family. We have already talked about it in our earlier article called 2.5-Inch External Hard Drives with 120GB Storage Capacity.
When you connect this drive to a PC, it is recognized as standard USB Mass Storage and doesn’t require any additional software for simple file copying. However, WD Sync will offer you a number of nice options. Following a Wizard with a user-friendly interface, you can not just copy files to the disk, but also encrypt them with a 128-bit AES encryption key, in case your HDD ends up in someone else’s hands. These data will all be stored on the disk in encrypted form and will only be accessible after entering a password in the WD Sync window. This is a handy and practical solution for always having your confidential information with you.
Besides, WD Sync, the storage solution is also bundled with the following tools and utilities: WD Diagnostic Tool to estimate the HDD status in the system, three Google applications (Picasa, Google Toolbar and Google Desktop Search), Adobe Reader and a brief handbook.
The following testing utilities were used:
Testbed configuration was as follows:
We installed the generic OS drivers for our tests. The hard drive was formatted in FAT32 and NTFS as one partition with the default cluster size. For some tests described later in this article 32GB partitions were created and formatted in FAT32 and NTFS with the default cluster size, too.
We didn’t have that many options when choosing the opponent for our hard disk drive – solutions on 2.5-inch platters with large storage capacity like that appeared not so long ago; besides, we haven’t yet come across any other mobile USB HDDs like that. So, we decided to compare the performance of our today’s hero against that of the Western Digital Passport 120GB, which we have already tested before.
As usual, we would like to start with the IOMeter sequential read and write tests. It 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.
Compared with the smaller solution, the read speed of Passport 250GB improved for almost all data block sizes. When reading large data chunks, the speed hit 33MB/s, which is 10% faster than what the 120GB model is capable of.
However, the linear write speed diagrams coincided everywhere except 1MB data chunks. While 120GB model performed really slowly with data blocks of this size, which could be explained by some mistake in the IDE-USB adapter, the newcomer has been cured from this issue.
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: in the beginning of the tests the reads are at 100%, while at the ends the writes hit 100%.
Let’s take a look at three diagrams showing the dependence of the HDD performance on the read-to-write request ratio under three types of workload: 1, 16 and 256 outgoing requests in the queue.
In case of 1 request queue as the share of writes increases, so does the Passport 250GB performance per second. Looks like the new hard drive learned to work efficiently with lazy writing, which we haven’t seen by USB devices before. In most cases, USB devices like that perform similarly to the Passport 120GB. As a result, Passport 250GB performs great when write requests dominate, and is just a little ahead during reads.
As the number of requests in the queue increases to 16, we see that the newcomer demonstrates much higher number of operations per second when read requests dominate the ratio. And again we don’t see the graph for the 250GB model to drop in the center part, which is typical of the external USB solutions. The 120GB model has a very vivid demonstration of this phenomenon.
When the queue hits 256 requests, the left side of Passport 250GB graphs rises even more, so that we notice a slight curve in the center. With any read-to-write ratio, the new solution outperforms its predecessor, but the difference is especially noticeable in the center of the graph, where Passport 120GB runs at its minimal speed.
These patterns simulate the typical server workload. We will present the results as performance ratings, for better understanding. The drive’s performance rating is calculated in this test by averaging its speed at request queue depths of 1, 4, 16 and 64.
In Fileserver pattern Passport 250GB is about 1.5 times faster than its younger brother. If you look at the results table, you will see that the performance correlation between the testing participants is pretty much the same at any number of requests in the queue.
Passport 250GB is ahead again, but with smaller advantage, in Webserver pattern. The results table again shows that the biggest contribution comes from performance with long queues, while in case of smaller queues, the performance difference between the competitors is insignificant.
The Workstation pattern simulates the typical load on a workstation at request queue depths up to 32. This test was performed on the full capacity of the drives as well as on a 32GB partition created on them.
To calculate the overall performance rating of a drive in this test, we use the following formula:
Performance = Total I/O (queue=1)/1 + Total I/O (queue=2)/2 + Total I/O (queue=4)/4 + Total I/O (queue=8)/8 + Total I/O (queue=16)/16 + Total I/O (queue=32)/32.
When the entire storage capacity of the hard disk drive is involved, Passport 250GB outperforms the younger model, just like in the previous tests.
When we reduce the partition in question to 32GB, the gap between the testing participants increases even more.
The multi-threaded tests simulate a situation when there are several (from one to four) applications working with the drive at the same time. The depth of the outgoing request queue is varied from 1 to 8. We’ll discuss read and write diagrams for a request queue of 1, as most representative of real-life operation modes.
Passport 250GB demonstrates a convincing victory at any number of read requests in the queue.
In case of 1 thread of write requests, Passport 250GB is a little bit ahead of the 120GB model. However, when the number of simultaneous threads increases, the situation changes dramatically. In case of two or more threads, Passport 120GB slows requests processing by 1/3, while our newcomer runs almost at the same pace proving highly efficient with multiple write threads. When a large number of files is copied on an external hard drives in a few steps, the second chunk of data doesn’t usually start copying before the first one has been copied completely. This helps to avoid performance drops caused by simultaneous work with several competing data threads. Passport 250GB doesn’t have this drawback and shows equal speed with a single as well as multiple threads, which is a very rare occasion.
We will start our discussion of WinBench results with the graphs showing read speed from the HDD surface:
WD Passport 250GB
WD Passport 120GB
The read speed from the surface graphs illustrate very nicely all the changes that were made to the USB electronics of the new drive. The read speed of the new solution reached 35MB/s, which is a very decent result. However, it is definitely not enough for the hard disk drive installed into Passport 250GB: the graphs is pretty level on the most part and only on the last 30GB of space the read speed from the platters gets lower than the data transfer rate along the USB bus. It’s a pity that this HDD doesn’t have eSATA- or at least FireWire interface.
Now let’s check out WinBench 99 results for the 32GB partition formatted for FAT32:
Again passport 250GB performs faster than its smaller counterpart. By the way, this benchmark is very sensitive to the operational mode for external solutions. Namely, if you disable HDD caching, the results will be much worse overall. For example, Passport 250GB scores only 8090 points in High End Disk WinMark 99 and 2990 points in Business Disk WinMark 99 with disabled caching. Pretty modest result, I should say, compared with the 33400 and 15000 points respectively with enabled caching.
In NTFS Passport 250GB retains its superiority.
As we can see from the read graphs, the new HDD is much faster. The USB data transfer rate limits its performance in the beginning of the drive, however, in the end it is the HDD read speed from the platters that acts as a limiting factor. Thanks to higher per platter data density, Passport 250GB outperforms the 120GB model by almost 10MB/s.
As for the access time, the newcomer gets slightly – 0.2ms - ahead of the competitor.
The last test today will be FileCopy Test. Two 32GB partitions are created on the drives and formatted in FAT32 and then in NTFS. 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.
We’ll discuss the FAT32 results first.
The new hard drive outperforms the youngest model during files creation in all patterns, although the overall performance difference is not dramatic.
During file reading, Passport 250GB is again an indisputable leader. Moreover, the difference from the opponent is pretty significant.
File copying within the same partition is no problem for our newcomer at all. Passport 250GB runs 3MB/s+ faster in MP3, ISO and Install patterns (note that they consist of few larger files).
However, the most impressive victory is won during file copying from one partition to another. While Passport 120GB slows down a little bit, the 250GB model speeds up and the gap between the rivals in MP3, ISO and Install patterns increases even more.
And now let’s take a look at the HDD performance in the same tests, but with the partitions formatted for NTFS file system.
The transition to NTFS file system doesn’t change anything during files creation. The newcomer is again ahead, although the advantage is not too great.
Passport 250GB remains an indisputable leader during file reading.
During files copying within the same partition and from one partition to another, the situation also repeats. Passport 250GB is always ahead of the younger competitor.
The new Western Digital solution turned out an indisputable success. It is not only the today’s largest external solution on 2.5” hard disk drive, but it proves excellent in all work modes tested. I would specifically like to stress great performance of Passport 250GB during multi-threaded work as well as efficient work with lazy write algorithms that the drive owes to the new IDE-USB adapter. Unfortunately, USB interface sometimes becomes a limiting factor and prevents the drive from revealing everything it is capable of.
As for the encountered drawbacks, I would like to mention the absence of additional power supply, which is typical for the entire Passport series, as well as easily scratchable surface of the casing.