Maxtor OneTouch HDD - Page 3

- Tests

• Seek Times Test

As the test results show, the Maxtor 250GB OneTouch has an access time of 19.97ms when reading and 9.2ms when writing. The drive didn't produce any outliers at both reading/writing service times.

Intel's IPEAK on-line help explains what outliers mean "...A well behaved storage subsystems should have any outliers in the service time distribution and the distribution should be narrow. Outliers in the distribution make the storage subsystem unsuitable for real-time applications, such as multi-media, where variations in service time are detrimental..."

Below are the Read/Write Service times as reported with Intel's IPeak Analyze software:

• WinBench 99 Test Results

At both High-End and Business WinMark99 tests, the drive performed poorly. We don't know what the cause of this is, maybe the WinBench99 software doesn't support accurately external HDD drives.

• WinBench99 Transfer Rate Tests

The WinBench99 transfer rate performance is quite good. The drive started at 38.3MB/S and ended at 34.6MB/s. This kind of performance bottlenecked with the FireWire interface. Certainly, performance would be better if the drive is connected as an interl IDE drive.

The "Data Density" graph gives more information about the drive's performance throughout the entire disk's capacity.

• Intel's IPEAK Tests

Intel's IPEAK test results combine both reading/writing actions and give a weighted score based upon each drive's performance in each specific task. The height of each bar is the measured mean service time per disk access for a drive stimulated with I/Os from the given workload. Shorter bars represent better performance. As we will see, a drive that scores well in the "Desktop" test, doesn't mean that it will perform the same in the "Server" mode test, since the I/O operations are different.

In the above picture you can see the weighted (average) score of all tested drives. Despite the fact that the Maxtor performed poorly in the WinBench99 scores, it showed very good performance in Intel's IPEAK RankDisk software. The high access times don't affect the desktop weighted score due to higher reads vs. writes. In the "Server" test, the drive delivers the lowest and best mark since its write access times are very low (9.2ms).