Samsung S2 Portable 3 1TB USB3 2.5″ HDD review

Real world tests

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As with benchmarking SSDs it is pointless conducting an endless amount of benchmarks on an external hard disk.  Real users may conduct a few benchmarks when they first get their hard disk, but most users simply want a drive that performs well in the real world. 

The benchmarks have so far shown us that this hard disk provides very good sequential throughput, but rather limited performance with small random transfers.  However, these benchmarks alone say very little about how the drive will perform in the real world.

Real world single file copy test

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The most common task people use a portable hard disk for is transferring bulky files from one computer to another.  So in this test, we will measure how long it takes to transfer a 1GB file to and from the hard disk. 

We used a script to measure the timing, with the source file stored on a RAM disk to prevent the read source becoming a bottleneck and the computer being rebooted after the write test to clear the cache.  These tests were repeated to cover both USB2 and USB3 modes as well as both NTFS and FAT32 file systems.

The following are the results:

Just as we saw earlier with the sequential benchmarks, when it comes to storing bulky files, USB3 is roughly three times faster than USB2, at least with the drive in a clean state.  To calculate 60GB, we simply look at these times as minutes and it becomes quite clear just how much time USB3 can save copying very large files.

Real world small files copy test

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Not everyone uses a USB hard disk for bulky video files.  In fact, some simply use it to back up their documents and photos, many of could range from a few Kilobytes to a few Megabytes per file.  So in this test, we time how long it takes to copy 8,247 photos in a hierarchy of 245 folders totalling 1GB to and from the hard disk.

Like the previous test, these files are stored on a RAM disk as the source and we used a script to measure the timing.  The computer was rebooted after each write test to clear the cache.

The following are the results:

When it comes to small files, the difference between USB2 and USB3 is not as large with USB3 being about 50% faster in all but the FAT32 write tests.  However, what is very obvious here is that anyone planning on using an external hard disk to store photos or small files should consider changing the file system to NTFS.  When operating in either USB2 or USB3 mode, the NTFS file system took 1/5^th of the time to store the same file set.

Real world file deletion test

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One issue we noticed in the past when it comes to external hard drives is the amount of time it takes to delete a large folder from the drive, in some cases taking several minutes. 

So for this test, we simply timed the duration it took to delete the hierarchy of 8,247 files and 245 folders from the hard disk.  The computer was rebooted before we ran this test to clear the cache.  The timing was measured by a script.

As this test mainly involves very little data transferring, we ran these tests in USB3 mode only:

Once again, we can see the advantage of using NTFS for the file system, even when deleting files.  We believe that most of the time taken here is seeking related due to the Windows updating the file system for each file and folder deletion.

• IOMeter tests
• Software bundle