External Storage Roundup: LaCie, Toshiba, and WD

Name: LaCie Porsche P9220, Toshiba Canvio Connect, Western Digital My Passport Ultra
Brand: LaCie

by Seth Colaner — Friday, September 06, 2013, 11:15 AM EDT

We really like PCMark 7's Secondary Storage benchmark module for its pseudo real-world application measurement approach to testing. PCMark 7 offers a trace-based measurement of system response times under various scripted workloads of traditional client / desktop system operation. From simple application start-up performance, to data streaming from a drive in a game engine, and video editing with Windows Movie Maker, we feel more comfortable that these tests reasonably illustrate the performance profile of a hard drive in an end-user / consumer PC usage model, more so than a purely synthetic transfer test.

Futuremark's PCMark 7 Secondary Storage

http://www.futuremark.com

Once again the scores were relatively close, so there's not much of a discrepancy between the three drives in the Secondary Storage overall scores, although the Toshiba Canvio Connect was once again at the back of the grouping. In the more detailed benchmarks, you can see that the drives took turns taking the top spot in each sub test.