Seagate 120GB External Storage
by Purav Sanghani on September 29, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The Test
Our list of tests for external drives has many of the benchmarks as our internal hard disk drive, but we are focusing more on file system tasks, since external devices are mainly used for archival purposes. We have not changed our test bed from our usual storage platform. Take a look at the details.
Our test methods are as follows:
WinBench 99 - transfer rates over the disk surface, disk access time, and CPU utilization
HDTach - Sequential read speeds and burst speeds
Real World File System Task Tests - timed tests of basic file system tasks including zipping/unzipping and copying files from a higher performance SATA drive to the external device, as well as within the external device
Real World Multitasking Test - timed tests of basic multitasking processes, timing a file zip operation while copying a larger 4.5GB file
Our list of tests for external drives has many of the benchmarks as our internal hard disk drive, but we are focusing more on file system tasks, since external devices are mainly used for archival purposes. We have not changed our test bed from our usual storage platform. Take a look at the details.
| Seagate 120GB External Storage/Backup Test Bed | |
| Processor: | AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2GHz, 512KB L2 Cache, Socket 939) |
| Motherboard/Chipset Drivers: | Giga-Byte GA-K8NXP-SLI nForce4 (v6.66) |
| Hard Disk Drive(s): | Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB |
| RAM: | 1GB Corsair XMS4400 DDR550 (2x512MB, 2.5-4-4-8) |
| Video Card: | NVIDIA 6600GT 128MB SLI Edition (Single card) |
Our test methods are as follows:
WinBench 99 - transfer rates over the disk surface, disk access time, and CPU utilization
HDTach - Sequential read speeds and burst speeds
Real World File System Task Tests - timed tests of basic file system tasks including zipping/unzipping and copying files from a higher performance SATA drive to the external device, as well as within the external device
Real World Multitasking Test - timed tests of basic multitasking processes, timing a file zip operation while copying a larger 4.5GB file
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foot167 - Thursday, September 29, 2005 - link
I just returned the 300GB model today after 3 weeks of use. Everything I read about them said they were terrible but I had to give them a shot anyway. Sometimes my computer wouldn't recognize the drive. it would say no drive there. then on monday the drive decided that it was unformatted and needed to be reformatted. good thing that i kept a copy of everything i put on the external on my internal drives.the 300gb one can be had for under $200 and even less after rebates.
How about some reliability tests on these drives. Does the firewire/usb interface affect the reliability of these drives? Are they prone to crashing for some reason?
ScottyDog - Friday, September 30, 2005 - link
I agree with your comments about reliability with these external drives. I have one and have the same problems with the disk suddenly becoming "unformatted". I have done a google search and this is a huge problem with these external USB or Firewire chipsets whether they are are the Oxford or Prolific flavors.Somebody really needs to do an article about what is going on here as I have resorted to leaving my drive off unless I am doing a backup and then need to restore otherwise all my data gets destroyed.
I originally thought it might be due to write caching and changing it to safe mode but it makes no difference with mine. If I leave it on eventually it becomes "Unformatted".
type this into google and you will see this is a wide spread problem with these external drives: windows delayed write failure
Googer - Thursday, September 29, 2005 - link
Dosen't it have 1394? I won't buy an External HDD with out 1394a and/or 1394b.MASCARNHAS - Monday, June 21, 2010 - link
I've used Report and although its great, I've had better luck with WheresTheFreeSpace. It is Modeled after a PC application that is very popular called <a href="http://www.wheresthefreespace.com">Treesiz... (but its for Mac).</a>