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In the Forums... |
Posted: March 13th, 2002 Written by: Tuan Huynh USB 2.0 Performance  SiSoft Sandra’s File System benchmark is a good gauge for comparing Hard Drive performance; it runs various write and seek tests to come up with a score. Looking at the benchmarks, the USB2.0 Hard Drive looks to score decently, but it still scores below the Iomega Peerless 20GB Firewire drive. There can be many factors that can contribute to the low score, I suspect that the USB2 to IDE controller needs to be worked on a little bit. Nonetheless, when compared to a USB 1.1, USB 2.0 based hard drives completely dominate similar USB 1.1 models. The USB2 drive outperforms its USB 1.1 predecessor by nearly 10 times, this is a very drastic and welcomed improvement and shows of what’s next to come.  After testing and benchmarking with the QPS M3 how it was straight from factor, I suspected that the 40 conductor cable was the main reason for the slow performance. After I replaced the cable, I commenced to running SiSoft Sandra File System benchmark. The performance improvement was negligible and only showed a 1% difference.  After further investigation, I suspected the hard drive to be the culprit so I replaced the 5400RPM Western Digital drive with a Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 40GB 7200RPM drive to see if there would be a speed improvement. To my surprise there was a speed improvement of about 10%. A speed improvement of about 10% is better then the standard 5400RPM Western Digital drive, but there still leaves performance to be desired. Thus I have come to the conclusion that the In System USB2 to IDE controller still needs to be worked on and tweaked quite a bit before it will perform as well as an ATA66 drive, if it were to take advantage of USB2’s available bandwidth. USB 2.0 Optical drive performance Since I had the enclosure opened already, I thought I’d have a little fun with some optical drives. First I decided to throw in my 12x10x32x AOpen CD-RW drive to see if it would work. It was a success and was detected immediately. After it was detected and installed, I attempted to burn a CD with random files and songs on it. The CD burned perfectly at 12x and took approximately 7 minutes to burn since it had to convert the MP3’s into Wave files. With the great bandwidth of USB2.0, we will be able to see desktop speed equivalent external burners much like the Plextor 24x10x40x USB2.0 burner. Just when you thought I’d stop at USB 2.0 CD-RW drives, you were wrong! Since I had my 16x DVD-Rom drive lying around, I decided to plug it into the USB2 to IDE controller and perceived with playing a DVD movie. I commenced by putting in disc 1 of the Simpsons Complete First Season DVD Collection and opened up Power DVD XP. Power DVD XP played the episodes fine without any problems. The audio was synced correctly with the video and there were no video abnormalities like skipping or slowing down. This feat would’ve never been possible with traditional USB1.1 but made possible by USB 2.0’s amazing bandwidth and potential.
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