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. For USB and Firewire tests, we are using a ByteCC ME-740U2F enclosure with a ATA133 hard drive.
The Dell XPS M1710 performs as we would expect for a system running SATA-150. The Alienware systems pull ahead because of their RAID abilities, and the Asus G2 measures differently due to its older ATA-100 drive.
The XPS M1710 comes up a bit short in the USB test by about 3 MB/s. Perhaps it’s a bit easy to blame Vista, but that is the only fundamental difference between the various systems being tested. For Firewire, the XPS M1710 is right on par with what we expect.