Seagate 100GB 2.5-Inch & 5GB 1.0-Inch USB Drives

Seagate 100GB 2.5-Inch & 5GB 1.0-Inch USB Drives

Published August 25, 2008 at 01:15:55 PM, by Tim Supples

Overview

External storage devices are the bread & butter for hardcore mobile users, providing flexibility in data storage and transferring that has been unparalleled in computing history. Its been a long time since users have been stuck with 1.44MB 3.5" "floppy" drives, but not too long ago mobile users were stuck with cumbersome recordable CDs as the data transfer/backup medium of choice. Sure for a while now you could pick up an external desktop hard drive, but then you have a bulky enclosure and separate power adapter.

Today's mobile storage devices are infinitely more refined and practical. Today we are looking at two shining examples of modern mobile storage, 2.5" and 1.0" external USB drives. While their capacity and performance differs greatly, both are excellent resources for any computing commuter.

Seagate 100GB 2.5" USB

Seagate's line of external 2.5" drives are well designed for the mobile user. The enclosure for the 2.5" notebook drive is small, light, and sturdy. We've used and abused this drive for months, toting it around in a number of different ways with no problems thus far. There are no fans in the case, but none are needed! If you look closely at the grill on the enclosure, it does appear ventilated. The only cause for concern in the design of this device is the USB cable. It connects to the drive via a 5-pin mini-USB connection, but the connection point feels a little flimsy. However after months of hard use, the USB connector has given us zero problems. Speaking of the USB cable, it splits off into two connectors. Color coded green for Data/Power and blue for Power only, the cable is about 3 feet long and well insulated. The USB connectors are thick and sturdy, so no amount of plugging/unplugging should wear them out.

Our use of this drive on numerous laptops and desktops was fault-free for the most part. Some machines are unable to supply enough power to the drive over one USB connector, necessitating the use of the seconday Blue USB power connector. An odd issue we noticed with an IOGear powered USB hub was that the drive performed very slowly when only plugged into one USB connector; plugging in the power connector caused the large file transfer to speed up significantly. This was an isolated issue and should concern no one, but if you are experiencing connection or transfer difficulties plug in the power plug first thing.

The USB cable wraps around the drive nicely for a bit easier storage, although a small carrying case would be a nice touch to see with this product. The biggest downside though to the Seagate External products is the warranty. While their internal hard drives, both 3.5" and 2.5", come with a staggering five year warranty, the external drives only come with a one year warranty! We're not sure if this desparity in warranty coverage is due to the extra abuse an external drive will take or not, but it is disappointing to see. It might make more sense for some consumers to invest in a quality 2.5" enclosure and your own hard drive, which if it is a Seagate will sport a full five year warranty. Overlooking the warranty, the advantage to a package like Seagate's is that the IDE to USB controller chip used is probably going to be higher quality than some of those you will find in cheaper external enclosures. This can affect drive performance, CPU usage, and compatibility with drive tools (like drive imaging software for instance).

Seagate 5GB 1.0" USB

With today's technology, size certainly does matter. For what seemed like an eternity, flash drives were stuck at 1GB and then 2GB capacities. Today with flash drive capacities at 8GB, the high capacity units like that are very expensive. A quick search on LaptopLogic's Price Search Engine reveals a 4GB flash drive runs about $125 shipped, while the Seagate 5GB Pocket Drive costs less than $90 shipped. $31.25 per GB or $18 per GB? The value of the Seagate Pocket Drive is obvious here, lots of capacity at a great price.

This rotund device houses a miniature, 1" hard drive spinning at 3600RPM with a 2MB cache. Of course these specs sound wimpy compared to modern 2.5" and 3.5" hard drives, but fitting a fast spinning platter in a small package is no easy task. We'll take a look at performance shortly, but the packaging of this device is excellent. It is a mere 0.71" thick and a hair over 3" across, making this 2.2 oz hard drive perfect for the mobile user. While it isn't as petite as most flash drives today, you of course trade cost for size; as with most things in computing these days. That said, we never found the size of the Seagate Pocket Drive to be cumbersome. It may be a little large to fit in some pants pockets, but it resides great in any bag or carrying case.

As you can see above, you simply rotate the inner, black plastic shell to expose the USB connector. Remove the USB plug from its cradle and pull to expose the X" cable. The retractable USB cable has an advantage over typical flash drives with integrated USB connectors, as the extended cable allows you to connect to USB ports that are in awkward positions or surrounded by other cables (like the back of a desktop computer).

Setup Method

Once again we've used our trusty IBM Thinkpad T42 for these tests:

Specifications	IBM Thinkpad T42
Processor	Intel Pentium M 750 (2.0GHz, 2MB L2 Cache)
Front Side Bus	400MHz
Chipset	Intel 855PM
LCD	15" SXGA+ (1400x1050)
Memory	1GB (2x512MB) DDR333 SO-DIMM
Graphics	ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 with 64MB VRAM
Operating System	Windows XP Professional w/SP2

The Thinkpad T42 was set to run at full performance by setting the power scheme set to 'Home/Office Desk' with the AC plugged in, meaning that the CPU will not underclock while running the tests. For the battery performance test, the power scheme was set to 'Portable/Laptop'. This activates SpeedStep technology, which lowers CPU speed when not needed, thus increasing battery life. Screen brightness and audio were both set to 50% and Wi-Fi was turned off. Each test was repeated 3 times to ensure accuracy. Before each test was run, the laptop was rebooted and its hard drive defragmented.

Synthetic Tests

IOMeter 2004.07.30 is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool, originally developed by Intel. We ran four different tests using IOMeter, consisting of two different tests performed at both 100% read and 100% write. CPU utilization is also measured during each test. To obtain an idea of CPU utilization, we averaged the read & write utilization during each of the Maximum I/O and Maximum Throughput tests.

• Maximum Throughput: This test simulates maximum drive throughput using 64KB packet sizes in 100% sequential order, performed at both 100% read and 100% write.

WinBench99 is a subsystem-level benchmark that measures the performance of a PC's graphics, disk, and video subsystems in a Windows environment. We ran the Disk Transfer Rate test.

SiSoft Sandra is a comprehensive testing suite, able to benchmark or test almost any computer subsystem. We ran the Removeable Storage Benchmark which tests read/write performance using multiple file sizes. Originally we wanted to use real world tests for these file sizes, but we found Sandra's results to be almost exactly in line with our real world tests. For this reason we opted to use the more easily reproduceable Sandra benchmark.

Real World Tests

Note: All of the timed tests were repeated three times, with the drive defragmented and rebooted between test runs. The final score is the average of the three scores.

400MB File Copy Time is measured as the time is takes to copy a 400MB file from the Windows desktop to the root folder of the external drive.

400x1MB File Copy Time is measured as the time is takes to copy 400 1MB files from the Windows desktop to the root folder of the external drive.

300MB Zip on Disk measures the time it takes to use the Windows file compression utility to create a ZIP file of our Office 2003 installation folder on the external drive itself.

2GB File Copy is the amount of time it takes to copy a 2GB file from the internal hard drive to the external drive.

SiSoft Sandra

We're going to start off our benchmarks with the SiSoft Sandra Removeable Storage Benchmark. This program tests drive performance measuring read/write throughput of many different file sizes.

SiSoft Sandra Cont'd

We really see two opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of performance here. With tons of small files, say text documents, the Seagate Pocket Drive performs rather abysmally. Most drives' performance does suffer extraordinarily with small files, but this is just the little drive that couldn't. The much larger 2.5" drive handles every test well, maintaing throughput around 20MB/s. As we'll see in the next tests, each drive's maximum throughput is pretty much seen with the 64MB Read tests here.

This particular file test is a unique test of a drive's performance, and we see the same disparity here.

WinBench99

WinBench99 shows a little different transfer rate than the previous programs, but all are in the same peak range. The 2.5" USB consistently performs around 30MB/s, which is pretty respectable given the overhead of the USB interface. The Pocket Drive is less impressive, but all our test results point towards 6-7MB/s peak transfer rate.

IOMeter

IOmeter worked its magic again, filling these empty drives with a test file and finding just how fast these little beauties will go.

The results pretty much mirror our Sandra results, although it appears IOMeter doesn't quite let the Pocket Drive show its full potential.

Since the 2.5" Portable Drive can transfer so much more information, its no surprise that CPU utilization is lower on the Pocket Drive.

File Copy Tests Now we move onto our real world tests, which show some very interesting results indeed.

This test took an odd turn, when the 100GB drive was able to copy the 400MB file within the drive faster than to the drive! The Pocket Drive had much longer copy times, but it isn't unreasonable considering the drive specifications.

Copying such a large number of relatively small files usually brings most any drive to its needs, external drives are no exceptions! Even with the overhead of the USB inteface, the 5400.2 drive handles this test pretty well. The Hitachi 7K100 100GB 7200RPM internal drive copied 400x1MB files to itself in just 32.13 seconds and the internal version of the 5400.2 in 38.9 seconds, so the USB 5400.2's 48.67 second time isn't too shabby! Unfortunately the large number of files really cripple the Pocket Drive, puttering this little 3600RPM spinner out. If you're going to be dealing with a LOT of small files, a 2.5" drive might be a better choice at this point. Still, you can't argue with $80 for a 5GB pocket drive!

This is a unique test, combining lots of reading and writing I/O access. The Pocket Drive actually does a little better here than we expected, considering its poor performance working with lots of small files.

The 2GB file copy test is for those out there that need to transport large files. We chose a 2GB file size with the thought of testing 4GB and higher drives only to give users a relative idea how quickly those large files will copy!

Conclusion

Specifications	Seagate 100GB USB	Seagate 5GB USB
Capacity	100GB	5 GB
Spindle Speed	5400RPM	3600RPM
Cache	8MB	2MB
Interface	USB 2.0	USB 2.0
Cost	$165	$88
Dollars per Gigabyte	$1.65/GB	$17.60/GB

Today we took a look at two excellent products from a company that hasn't failed to impress us with their products. The 5GB Pocket Drive is a great way to get high capacity in a tiny form factor, all at a low cost. Its performance is a bit short of impressive, but should be sufficient for most people's uses. We'll be taking a look at some new high capacity flash drives soon to see how this hard drive-based alternative stacks up.

The external 100GB USB drive has much better performance and a massively lower $/GB ratio, at the cost of increased size. Anyone with a reasonably large laptop case or backpack should be able to find a safe place to store the 2.5" drive, thanks to its relatively small enclosure and use of USB power. If you can live with the extra size of the 2.5" model, it is definitely the better buy. Much better performance and twenty times the capacity provide a much more robust solution than the smaller Pocket Drive, but some people just can't live with the larger size!

Obviously the test results we've presented here aren't as valuable without an idea how the other mobile storage solutions perform. We'll be taking a look at high capacity flash drives and other hard drive based solutions soon, providing a well rounded look at the world of mobile storage today.

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Technical Specifications

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