Testing:

In order to test the Seagate GoFlex Satellite 500GB mobile wireless storage device, we used the following base system:

» Intel Core i5 2500K 3.3GHz processor
» ASUS P8P76 Rev 3.0 motherboard
» nVidia GeForce GTX 470 video card
» Micro Center G2 Series 64GB SSD
» Western Digital 1TB SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Cooler Master EPS 12V 750 Watt power supply
» Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit operating system



We also used the following 2.5" SATA drives connected via the included GoFlex Satellite's USB 3.0 cable connected to the P8P76's USB 3.0 on-board port:

» Seagate GoFlex Ultra-Portable 500GB
» Seagate GoFlex Ultra-Portable for Mac 1TB

All three of these drives have a 5400RPM spindle speed. While both the Satellite and GoFlex 500GB drives only have 8MB of cache memory, the GoFlex for Mac has a 16MB cache. Lastly, both the Satellite and Mac drive operate in SATA/300 or SATA II mode, while the older GoFlex 500GB drive operates in SATA/150 or SATA I mode.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64:

We'll first take a look at the results from CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64. This test provides four sets of results to detail the read and write performance of the drive in question. Units of measure are MB/s, and higher values are better.

The first two tests deal with sequential reads and writes on the three test drives. In both tests, the extra cache of the Mac drive gives it an advantage over the Satellite drive.




When we bring smaller chunks of data into the equation, the ability to operate on more bandwidth becomes less of an issue. The drive with the largest cache still comes out on top here.