Using a free application called allows us to objectively measure the time of transfer files across our computers storage devices. One of the most common operations performed on a PC is moving/copying files.

This should be a good base to test both of these portable HDDs with dealing with small file sizes to the larger file sizes. These files range anywhere from a couple of hundred Bytes to almost touching 20 MBs per file, and there are roughly 4,024 files in my MP3 music folder. For this portion of testing I chose to use my ever increasing MP3 music collection of just a tad over 17 GBs. Keep in mind, what the Synthetic benchmarks report as far as performance does not always relate to actual real world performance.įor my Real world testing portion I will be using TeraCopy to measure the time, and how fast that transfer rate is in MB/s, to move a specific set of files from my one of my computer back up HDDs to each of these portable HDDs. Now since I have gotten all of the Synthetic benchmarks out of the way, it is now time to see how these portable HDDs perform in a real world environment. When it comes to the smaller 4K file sizes these smaller files are absolutely brutal to HDDs, so any small gain here is a significant gain. When dealing with the smaller 4K file sizes the Western Digital 2TB My Book Essential portable HDD was able to edge out in front of the Seagate 1TB Back Up Plus Portable HDD by 0.1 MB/s during the Read portion of testing and both of these drives tied each other during the Write portion of testing.

Time for me to move over to another popular storage device benchmark Crystal Disk Mark, while using this benchmark to test both of the portable HDDs we can see that the Western Digital 2TB My Book Essentials once again has come out on top in both of the Sequential Read Write testing, outperforming the Seagate 1TB Back Up Plus portable HDD by almost 10MB/s. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. Crystal Disk Mark and TeraCopy Results Crystal Disk MarkĬrystal Disk Mark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds.

Mark disk