SimpleTech 250GB Signature Mini Portable Drive Author:  Jason Dumbaugh Date:  2008.04.22 Topic:  Storage Provider:  SimpleTech Manufacturer:  SimpleTech

SimpleTech 250GB Signature Mini Portable Drive

Testing:

The tests were performed on the VenomOoze rig with the following components:

• Cooler Master 650W Real Power Pro Power Supply
• Super Talent 2GB DDR2-1000 RAM kit
• EVGA 650i nForce ULTRA LGA775 Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 overclocked to 3.21GHz
• Thermaltake BigWater 760i Liquid Cooling System
• ATI Radeon HD3450 Graphics Card

File Transfer Test:

We first started out by testing transfer speeds with different sized files and compared them to our previously tested SimpleTech 160GB drive:

You'll notice it rises as files get larger, but must plateau off somewhere around 1.5GB. The 250GB Signature Mini wasn't faster than our previous test on the 160GB SimpleDrive, which we attribute to the fact that the Signature Mini has a smaller drive size. Usually, larger drives take a longer time to spin up than the smaller ones, which explains the ~50% lag on the first transfer.

Benchmarks:

HD Tune Pro 3.0 was run on the drive three times for read speeds - the graphs are shown below. The average for the read speed was 32.6MB/sec.

(click the thumbnails to enlarge)

HD Tune read 1st run	HD Tune read 2nd run	HD Tune read 3rd run

We then ran CrystalDiskMark on the Signature Mini three times - the graphs are shown below. The average read speed was 35.2MB/sec.

CrystalDiskMark 50MB	CrystalDiskMark 100MB

CrystalDiskMark 500MB	CrystalDiskMark 1000MB

SiSoft Sandra was run on the drive to test the operations per minute, endurance factor, drive index, and random access time. The results are shown below.

SiSoft Sandra - Removable Storage	SiSoft Sandra - Physical Disks

HD Tune was a good example for our benchmarks. It shows the scatter plot of data used for performance. CrystalDiskMark was used to show each speed in each bracket, and was also very helpful in determining the speeds of the drive. Finally, SiSoft Sandra was used to pit the Signature Mini against other drives of its kind. Below are the speeds recorded by these programs, as well as a computed average between them.

This again did slightly slower than the SimpleDrive we tested earlier, but only by 1.65MB/sec. This again is attributed to the larger drive like on the last page.