Hard Drive, USB, and Firewire

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 comparing against:

  • 5400 RPM drive in the Asus VX1
  • 7200 RPM drive in the Dell XPS M1710
  • Two 7200 RPM drives in the Aurora m9700 in RAID 0 (striping) for ultimate performance

For USB and Firewire tests, we are using a ByteCC ME-740U2F enclosure with a ATA133 hard drive.

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*m9700 in RAID 0

    • Asus VX1 – Intel T7400 Core 2 Duo, 2x1GB RAM, NVIDIA Go 7400 512MB
    • Asus Z96J – Intel T7600 Core 2 Duo, 2x512MB RAM, ATI Mobility X1600 256MB
    • Dell M1710 – Intel T2600 Core Duo, 2x1024MB RAM, NVIDIA Go 7900 GS 256MB
    • Alienware mALX – AMD Turion 64 ML-44, 2×1024 RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX 512MB
    • Alienware m9700 – AMD Turion 64 ML-44, 2×1024 RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS 512MB

With mirror RAID, the Aurora mALX has the fastest random access speed we have ever tested here at PC Perspective. You can have the mALX configured in Stripe mode for even faster performance, but I do not recommend that for data integrity reasons.

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    • Asus VX1 – Intel T7400 Core 2 Duo, 2x1GB RAM, NVIDIA Go 7400 512MB
    • Asus Z96J – Intel T7600 Core 2 Duo, 2x512MB RAM, ATI Mobility X1600 256MB
    • Dell M1710 – Intel T2600 Core Duo, 2x1024MB RAM, NVIDIA Go 7900 GS 256MB
    • Alienware mALX – AMD Turion 64 ML-44, 2×1024 RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX 512MB
    • Alienware m9700 – AMD Turion 64 ML-44, 2×1024 RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS 512MB

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    • Asus VX1 – Intel T7400 Core 2 Duo, 2x1GB RAM, NVIDIA Go 7400 512MB
    • Asus Z96J – Intel T7600 Core 2 Duo, 2x512MB RAM, ATI Mobility X1600 256MB
    • Dell M1710 – Intel T2600 Core Duo, 2x1024MB RAM, NVIDIA Go 7900 GS 256MB
    • Alienware mALX – AMD Turion 64 ML-44, 2×1024 RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX 512MB
    • Alienware m9700 – AMD Turion 64 ML-44, 2×1024 RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS 512MB

USB and Firewire performance are right on par with all other systems, so there’s nothing unusual to report here.

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