Testing (continued):

AIDA Extreme Edition v1.60.1300:

Our last benchmark is AIDA Extreme Edition. The AIDA utility has both a read and write benchmark, but because the write portion wipes any data on the test drive, we have chosen not to run it here. The read suite of tests looks at linear read speeds at both a beginning, middle, and end point. For our purposes we will skip the mid-point results, mostly because the numbers were virtually identical to the end results.

In the first two tests, our Satellite drive brings up the rear. As our long sustained read continues, it begins to make up ground and only finishes less than 1MB/s behind the GoFlex 500GB drive.




In our random read test, the GoFlex Satellite fared a bit better, but not nearly as well as the Mac drive.




Again, with the buffered read test, the Satellite's performance begins to show. Here it is almost a full 70MB/s faster than the older GoFlex drive and less than 8MB/s slower than the Mac drive with twice the cache.



Lastly, we look at access time and latency. As we saw in the HD Tune Pro testing, the Satellite is a good bit quicker to respond than the other two drives by a good bit.