Testing:
The Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus 1TB External Hard Drive was connected to a test system with the following components installed for this review:
» Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 dual core processor
» Thermalright Ultima-90 Heatpipe CPU Cooler
» ASUS P5KC P35 ATX motherboard
» OCZ Technology PC3-10666 ReaperX HPC 2GB DDR3 Kit
» Two Western Digital Raptor 10,000RPM 36GB hard drives
» Zippy GSM-6600P(G1) 600W power supply
» eVGA GeForce 8800GTS G92 512MB video card
» SAMSUNG 20x DVD Burner with LightScribe
» Sunbeamtech Tuniq 3 Mid Tower ATX case
» Windows XP Professional SP2
Testing consisted of running through a couple benchmark applications, as well as conducting some real world file transfers to measure performance.
The following list details the tests to be executed:
» HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0
» HD Tune 2.54
» Real World Testing
The OneTouch 4 Plus was tested in both the USB 2.0 and Firewire modes of operation for each test.
HD Tach 3.0.4.0:
The first test conducted was
Simpli Software's HD Tach RW 3.0.4.0 benchmark. This test provides information about the drive being tested, and the graph below details the random access time, CPU utilization, the average read rate, and the burst rate of the drive being tested. Lower values are desirable for random access time and CPU utilization, while higher values are better for average read rate and burst rate.
The HD Tach benchmark shows that USB 2.0 holds an edge over Firewire in terms of data transfer rates, and that the speeds achieved with USB 2.0 are rather impressive.
