zero\’s blog

Two months ago I bought a Western Digital My Passport Studio 500GB with USB 2.0/Firewire 800/400. It has a 5400rpm hard disk. It is self-powered what was the main reason I bought. First, I was looking for an external hard disk that has inside a 7200rpm hard disk and is self-powered. I couldn’t find such thing. So I decided for this one. I am pleased with this model. It is quiet, except there are sometimes clickings, but that is that annoying. The second most important thing was the Firewire 800 port for my iMac.

And of course I made some benchmarks if you are interested in for some numbers.

Created a 1GB big file named benchmark_1G in Terminal:
dd if=/dev/zero of=benchmark_1G bs=1m count=1024

Copied the file benchmark_1G from iMac’s HDD to WD Passport and vice versa (HFS+ partition):
time cp benchmark_1G /Volumes/My\ Passport/ (for writing)
time cp benchmark_1G /Users/$home_folder (for reading)

Firewire 800 results:

Writing
real 0m19.622s
user 0m0.003s
sys 0m1.281s

That is 52,24 MB/s. That is not bad at all because the WD Passport has a 5400rpm hard disk.

Reading
real 0m20.525s
user 0m0.003s
sys 0m1.514s

That is 49,95 MB/s.

USB 2.0 results:

Writing
real 0m34.243s
user 0m0.003s
sys 0m1.313s

29,91 MB/s.

Reading
real 0m26.476s
user 0m0.003s
sys 0m1.253s

38,67 MB/s.

Since the first iMac post I had two upgrades: from Mac OS X 10.5.2 to 10.5.3 and from 10.5.3 to 10.5.4.

Here are the benchmarks (24″ iMac with GF 8800GS – 2 Gb Ram):

Geekbench (32-bit) and 10.5.2.

Geekbench (32-bit) and 10.5.3.

Geekbench (32-bit) and 10.5.4.

Cinebench R10:

10.5.2

Rendering (Single CPU): 3222 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 5954 CB-CPU

Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.85

Shading (OpenGL Standard) : 6082 CB-GFX

10.5.3

Rendering (Single CPU): 3217 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 6160 CB-CPU

Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.91

Shading (OpenGL Standard) : 6139 CB-GFX

10.5.4

Rendering (Single CPU): 3235 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 6168 CB-CPU

Multiprocessor Speedup: 1.91

Shading (OpenGL Standard) : 6139 CB-GFX

Xbench:

10.5.2

10.5.4

I forgot to save the Xbench results for 10.5.3, sorry.