Hard Drive, USB, and Firewire Performance
We will now test the hard drive, USB, and Firewire performance using HDTach. Results from these tests are important if you do a lot of disk writing and reading like copying media files, and transferring files between external devices. To compare, we are testing the different hard drives that came in Asus laptops (all 5400 RPM) and the Dell XPS M1710 which has a 7200RPM SATA drive. For USB and Firewire tests, we are using a ByteCC ME-740U2F enclosure with a ATA133 hard drive.
HDTach | ||||
Asus |
Asus |
Asus |
Dell | |
Drive Details |
Seagate |
Hitachi |
Hitachi |
Hitachi |
Burst Speed |
82.2 |
118.4 |
115.9 |
114.4 |
Average Read Speed |
38.1 |
33.3 |
32.6 |
44.0 |
Random Access Speed |
16.5 |
17.9 |
17.9 |
15.4 |
Some really interesting results here! While the Asus Lamborghini does not use a SATA drive like all the other laptops, it actually comes out faster except when compared to the Dell XPS M1710 which is using a 7200 RPM SATA drive. This is certainly a surprise to me since I would have expected ATA-100 to be slower due to the interface.
HDTach | ||||
Asus |
Asus |
Asus |
Dell | |
Burst Speed |
32.8 |
32.9 |
31.9 |
33.3 |
Average Read Speed |
29.4 |
31.2 |
29.8 |
30.4 |
Random Access Speed |
14.5 |
14.3 |
14.3 |
14.5 |
HDTach | ||||
Asus |
Asus |
Asus |
Dell | |
Burst Speed |
41.9 |
41.5 |
41.3 |
40.7 |
Average Read Speed |
34.7 |
34.4 |
34.3 |
33.6 |
Random Access Speed |
14.0 |
14.0 |
14.0 |
14.1 |
USB and Firewire performance is what you’ve come to expect from a Intel 945 mobile motherboard, however the VX1 does appear to have marginally better sequential read using Firewire.