Cirago’s 10GB Smart Mobile Storage’s internal copy performance and USB performance was tested not only to determine how useful it is in the field, but how usable it is as a general storage solution. The device was tested using HDTach’s hard drive benchmark 3.0 to benchmark USB throughput, and internal copy performance was tested by measuring the time taken to copy a certain volume of files.
It didn’t matter whether we used SD, XD, or Compact Flash cards, the copy time was still relatively the same, yielding 1.4MB a second, which is still under the specified 2.0MB a second listed on the package. We can only conclude that the problem is in the device’s card interface, because even the slow 10GB hard drive is over eight times faster than that. Even at an optimistic 2MB data rate, it would take 16 minutes to unload a 2GB card.
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At that performance, you should still schedule some “down time” if you only have 1 media card for each device. The best way to leverage your time would be to have two cards, and switch to another one while the first is being copied.
USB performance was a little better, but not nearly at the level of most USB drives. HDTach reported the transfer rate at about 8GB a second, which doesn’t even come close to saturating USB 2.0. It could possibly be that this is the most the included 10GB drive can deliver, and you may have better results with a large 120GB hard drive. Even a modern flash drive is able to deliver around 10MB a second. If a 120GB drive in this device could deliver 12GB a second or more, then our tune may change, but based on the current performance, this device isn’t very useful as a general external storage solution.
