External Storage Roundup: LaCie, Toshiba, and WD
Test System and SANDRA
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with an SSD for the OS and benchmark installations. Our testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI mode was enabled. The drives inside the external storage unit were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.
First we ran SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run without formatting and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.
All three of these drives delivered a nice balance of read and write speeds. The LaCie Porsche P9220 delivered the strongest score of the trio, but both of the other entrants were close behind.
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| Hardware Used: | Relevant Software: | ||
| Processor - Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Hard Drives - |
Intel Core i7-3770K MSI Z77 MPOWER (Z77 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 4GB Kingston DDR3-1600 OCZ Vertex 4 SSD 128GB (OS Drive) LaCie Porsche P9220 Toshiba Canvio Connect WD My Passport Ultra |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64 Intel 9.2.0.1030, iRST 10.5.1027 DirectX 11 NVIDIA GeForce 306.97 Benchmarks Used: ATTO v2.47 CrystalDiskMark v3.01 x64 PCMark 7 SiSoftware Sandra 2011 |
First we ran SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run without formatting and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.
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