Verbatim Quad-Interface External HDD

ou see what I’m saying?  This thing was built for storage.  They also come in 1-Terabyte versions as well, if 500GB isn’t enough for you.  So what are we waiting for?  Let’s get retarded and test out the speed on this bad boy.  Here’s what I’m working with on this test run:

• 320GB Seagate HDD
• 2GB Samsung 800Mhz DDR2 RAM
• 750watt Corsair PSU
• Firewire 400 & 800
• eSATA
• Finlandia

Now you know my setup.  It’s my usual gaming machine as well as where I handle most of my work-related computing, so I depend on it to be fast enough to get the job done.  With that out of the way, here’s what came in the box.  First out was the HDD itself.  It has a mirrored front which was covered by a thin film to protect the surface.  The blue ring LED is the only feature the front has.  There is no power button on the front, only the on/off switch on the back under the power supply port.  Next out of the box is the instruction manual, a host of cables for all four connections, and the power supply cord.  Now it’s time to check out the speeds this thing is capable of.  Using HDTach, I’m going to run speed tests on the various connections available to see how they differ in comparison.  Before I do that, I’m going to use a 1GB padded file I created to test transfer time in an everyday situations on all four connections, results as follows:

I expected much better times from the Firewire 400 compared to the USB, but that just goes to show you the transfer burst speeds of USB can many times overcome the solid transfer speed of Firewire.  Now, to test the HDD speeds using HDTach.  Here are the results from that test:

	Interface Time to transfer 1GB transfer rate USB 2.0 55 seconds 17.8 MB/s Firewire 400 46 seconds 22.4 MB/s Firewire 800 38 seconds 28.8 MB/s eSATA 35 seconds 31.0 MB/s