=== GENERAL:
- Solid construction. After knocking on one side it may sound like a pressure cooker, but it does not bother me :-)
- Design - Geschmakssache - suits me's
- Additional rubber feet for vertical position can not be fixed so properly at the housing. But if you do not want to permanently push back and forth the drive, it is stable.
- 4 cable (good quality) for all 4 interfaces, each 1 m long are included. The length is enough for me, the longer cable for eSATA and USB3.0 are prone to failure
- Power supply blocked the adjacent sockets in the socket - but does not bother me too
- Freecom seems different hard drives in this drive to obstruct. If I'm not mistaken, in a report ST2000DL003-9VT166 (5900rpm, 64MB cash) was mentioned. In my drive tinkers a ST2000DM001-9YN164 (7200rpm, 64MB cash)
- I have not tested FireWire
- I have the hard drive reformatted to NTFS (supplied FAT32)
- Although I have saved but not tried the bundled software (and have not used it before)
- The drive was under Win7 Pro x64 (eSATA, USB3.0, USB2.0) and WinXP Pro x86 (since I had only USB2.0) recognized immediately with Windows drivers.
=== PERFORMANCE:
1. CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (500 MB, 3 runs) via eSATA:
Sequential Read: 195 996 MB / s
Sequential Write: 193 203 MB / s
Random Read 512KB: 57 385 MB / s
512KB Random Write: 105 724 MB / s (higher than reading - tested several times)
2. CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (500 MB, 3 runs) via USB3.0:
Sequential Read: 171 729 MB / s
Sequential Write: 187 782 MB / s
Random Read 512KB: 55 297 MB / s
512KB Random Write: 102 987 MB / s (higher than reading - tested several times)
3. CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (500 MB, 3 runs) via USB2.0 (the plate is bored because interface is lame):
Sequential Read: 34 420 MB / s
Sequential Write: 24,887 MB / s
Random Read 512KB: 24 461 MB / s
512KB Random Write: 24,773 MB / s
4. Image the entire hard drive (2 partitions) from the test laptop via eSATA (with Win7 standard tools):
171.2 GB in 33 minutes = 86.5 MB / s ("door to door" I mean, including all overheads)
Bottleneck however was the internal laptop HDD which had to provide data - according CrystalDiskMark is also close to the maximum value for this HDD
Windows also needs some time to prepare the data
5. Surface Scan with HDDScan 3.3:
In the first half of the plate (to 1.9 billion LBA) about 180-190 MB / s fairly constant, then we went down slowly
With 3.1 billion LBA (about 80% disk space) were still 145 MB / s
Then I stopped for the test to high internal temperature (see below)
Thus, these values have me 160 worth.
=== Internal temperature (influence on reliability / durability):
All values from the SMART interface via eSATA (also with different programs 'cross-checked' ;-)
1. Large numbers of files in various sizes to copy (by another test PC) via USB2.0
Ambient temperature: 22 ° C
Start Temperature: 25 ° C
Time: 3 hrs 45 mins
Final temperature: 39 ° C (Super, but here is no challenge to the HDD in the drive because the USB2.0 interface is too slow)
2. Image of the entire hard drive (2 partitions) from the test laptop via eSATA (with Win7 standard tools):
Ambient temperature: 22 ° C
Start Temperature: 32 ° C
Time: 33 min
Final temperature: 43 ° C (acceptable, but that was only 33 minutes at a rather moderate use with 86.5 MB / s for "slower" HDD in laptop)
3. Surface Scan with HDDScan 3.3 eSATA:
Ambient temperature: 24 ° C
Start Temperature: 31 ° C
Time: 3 hours
Final temperature: 57 ° C (. Fierce - the test I stopped at about 80%, the plate was of course true with maximum read rates challenged)
=== My conclusion:
For intensive use unsuitable (actually how all the drives with passive cooling).
But for my purposes (hard disk imaging, about 1x per month 3 to 4 computer) it seems to fit.
Excuse me for a long time to report. But I hope that it helps someone in their purchasing decision.
