Removable drive benchmarking 1

[WyldeCarde]

Hi all

I am being tasked with finding us a replacement removable drive set up for our mobile worker people.

They are all using Panasonic Toughbooks with PCMCIA based removable storage. These are used to back up the data on the drive continuously. This allows them to move to another unit easily shoudl there's fail.

The newer generation Toughbooks don't work with the PCMCIA storage cards, but do come with a memory card reader. I need to benchmark several SD cards and the original solution to establish a suitable replacement.

I can find a great many HDD benchmarking products but no removal storage benchmarks. Anyone have any suggestions

P.S. My gut reaction of "SD cards are faster, lets not bother benchmarking" is not acceptable apparently lol.

 

[Nelviticus]

Can't you just do some manual tests copying over then copying back a large file then lots of little ones? If you wanted something slightly more scientific than a stopwatch method it'd be pretty easy to write a small function in VBA (or your language of choice) using timers, or even a batch script that echos the time before it starts and when it ends.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[wahnula]

There's a USB flash drive called the Corsair Flash Voyager and also the Kingston DataTraveler that have excellenet transfer rates. USB drives tend to be a little more robust and also have encryption features, they are meant to be tossed around and yanked in and out of machines. Flash cards seem so...fragile and easy to lose, plus they are usually limited by the USB bus anyway. I am gentle with my gear but still have broken an SD card and a Memory stick while I still have the first 64MB USB key I bought in 2004.

It's probably wasted air but you should tell your employees that, when removing ANY removable storage, the should stop the device first by using the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon. It can prevent data loss & corruption.

Tony

 

[WyldeCarde]

These are for use in an aircraft so SD cards are if anything safer than USB sticks as, on a toughbook at least they are inside the very tough hide of a very tough laptop, they are onyl removed if a unit goes faulty, so aren't swapped very often.

I was hoping for some industry standard or some such peice of software that would return repeatable results that would mean something.

I found IOmeter which most review sites use, but they don't allow normal customers to do the write speed tests, which is what I am most interested in.

 

[Glenn9999]

If I recall, when I was playing around with drive benchmarks of my USB drive, I used HDTach

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach

Hope it helps.

 

[Glenn9999]

Oops, easily confusing (how Google searches and memory goes)...I used HDTune rather, though it looks like HDTach will work too.

http://www.hdtune.com/