Testing

To test the Seagate 400GB Pushbutton Backup external drive, I hooked it up to my system via USB and ran a few benchmarks and copied a large amount of files while keeping track of time. The test system consists of a Pentium 4 2.8c Northwood CPU (800 MHz FSB), a DFI LanPary PRO875B motherboard, 2x256MB Micron CL3 DDR400 and 2x512MB Kingmax CL2.5 DDR400, Seagate 200GB ATA 7,200RPM 8MB hard drive and an up-to-date installation of Windows XP SP2. I used the following programs and methods to benchmark the performance of the Pushbutton drive:

HD Tach RW 3.0.1.0
DiskBench 2.4.3.1
Sandra Lite 2005.3.10.50
My own real-world copy test

HD Tach

HDTach 3 has been completely rewritten for Windows 2000 and XP and will test the sequential read, random access and interface burst speeds of almost any attached storage device. While HDTach's results should be fairly close to real-world usage, it is still a benchmarking program and may not exactly represent actual performance.


Performance on this test shows both drives pretty even. The Maxtor has a bit higher read performance average, but also uses a few more CPU cycles doing so. The Seagate drive has a quicker access time.

DiskBench

DiskBench basically copies a file from point A to point B and records how long it took. For our tests, we had the program copy a 500 MB file (in 10x50 MB blocks) from the hard drive to the Seagate Pushbutton drive and spit out the transfer speeds. Due to the nature of this program, these results should do an extremely good job of representing the actual performance of the drives.

DiskBench

External Drive

Seagate 400GB Pushbutton

Maxtor 200GB OneTouch II

2.54

2.52

0

minutes (lower is better)

3

 

 

Again, things are pretty much even with no noticeable difference in copy performance.

Sandra

Sandra is designed to test the theoretical performance of a computer's components. The results may not be representative of real-world performance.

Sandra shows both drives performing identically.

Real-World Copy Test

My copy test actually consisted of two parts. For the first, I copied 11.8GB of MP3 files from my system drive to the external hard drive. For the second, I copied the contents of my entire system, 86.9GB total, to each drive. I manually recorded the length of time it took to complete each transfer.

So the copy test doesn't help any in distinguishing between the two drives. While the Maxtor performs the small copy set faster, it's slower on the large copy set. I guess I would call things even as the margins are pretty slim.

When considering an external hard drive, you should look at more than just performance numbers. Another important factor is the noise level of the drives you are considering. Both drives were practically silent while idle and under small loads. Under heavy loads, such as the MP3 copy test, the Maxtor was still near silent while the Seagate made a fair amount of noise. One other note of noise about the Seagate drive is that when not being used, it will spin itself down saving power and hopefully extending drive life. While I consider this a good thing, it makes a rather strange noise when parking the heads that might catch you off guard if you aren't aware of what is going on.