With the Mobile Drive XXS Leather 640 GByte, Freecom shows an external USB 3.0 hard drive that promises high troughput rates. Furthermore the external drive comes with a nice and decent external leather caseing. 
On the following pages we will show what Freecoms Mobile Drive XXS Leather with 640 Gigabyte is capable of.
| Page 1 - Introduction | Page 5 - Sequential read/write |
| Page 2 - Specifications | Page 6 - Random read/write |
| Page 3 - Preview | Page 7 - Fazit |
| Page 4 - How do we test? |
Discuss this article in the forum [pagebreak]
Specifications
| Model | Freecom Mobile Drive XXS Leather 640 GByte USB 3.0 |
| Capacity | 640 TByte |
| Interface | USB 3.0 |
| Dimension | 13.5 mm (H) x 79.5 mm (W) x 109.8 mm (L) |
| Weight | 155 Gramm Kg |
| Compatibility | Windows 7 / Vista / XP / Professional Windows 2000 Pro Mac OS X |
| Manual | Printed version |
| Warranty | 3 years |
Freecom kept its Mobile Drive XXS Leather with 640 Gigabyte as simple as possible. In principal the drive which has a capacity of 640 Gigabyte is a standard 2.5 inch hard drive which has been put into a leather case. Furthermore you can connect it with your computer using the USB 3.0 interface.
| Page 1 - Introduction | Page 5 - Sequential read/write |
| Page 2 - Specifications | Page 6 - Random read/write |
| Page 3 - Preview | Page 7 - Fazit |
| Page 4 - How do we test? |
Discuss this article in the forum [pagebreak]
Impressions
| Page 1 - Introduction | Page 5 - Sequential read/write |
| Page 2 - Specifications | Page 6 - Random read/write |
| Page 3 - Preview | Page 7 - Fazit |
| Page 4 - How do we test? |
Discuss this article in the forum [pagebreak]
How do we test?Testenvironment
| Model | Freecom Mobile Drive XXS Leather 640 GByte USB 3.0 | 640 GByte |
| Motherboard | ASRock Extreme7 Gen3 | |
| Chipset | Intel Z68 | |
| CPU | Intel Core i5-2500K | |
| Memory | Kingston HyperX DDR3-2133 | 2 GByte |
| Graphics card | AMD Radeon HD 5850 | |
| Storage (system) | Seagate 640 GByte | |
| Operating systems | Ubuntu 11.04 | |
| Filesystem | XFS |
We think everybody reading this article can imagine the following scenario: You just bought a hard drive which according the specs sheet should transfer 120 MByte/s reading and writing. In the reviews you read about astonishing 110 MByte/s but after you put the drive into you system it feels much slower. The whole story gets even worse when you start a benchmark which does randomread/write of 4 KByte blocks. There you only get two to three MBytes/s.
Because of this we don't want to publish screenshots of standard programs like HD-Tach, HD-Tune, ... we want our tests to be
- reproducible,
- accurate
- meaningful and
- varied
We test with activated caches and NCQ (Native Command Queueing) because they're also activated under daily use. But the data size tested is always at least twice the amount of the memory.
We noticed that the measuring error is constantly within ±2%. Therefore we mention it only here.Additionally we evaluate the S.M.A.R.T. data to assess if there are already errors.
The following table give you a brief overview to which points we turn our centre of attention.
| Test | Observations |
| Sequential Read/Write Tests |
|
| Random Read/Write Tests |
|
iozone3
iozone3 is a benchmark suit for storage solutions which natively runs under Linux.
Therefore we are testing the throughput with different block sizes using the following commands:
- iozone -Rb test16k.xls -i0 -i1 -i2 -+n -r 16k -s4g -t2
- iozone -Rb test32k.xls -i0 -i1 -i2 -+n -r 32k -s4g -t2
- iozone -Rb test64k.xls -i0 -i1 -i2 -+n -r 64k -s4g -t2
- iozone -Rb test128k.xls -i0 -i1 -i2 -+n -r 128k -s4g -t2
- iozone -Rb test256k.xls -i0 -i1 -i2 -+n -r 256k -s4g -t2
- iozone -Rb test512k.xls -i0 -i1 -i2 -+n -r 512k -s4g -t2
Why do we test different block sizes?
It is important to reproduce scenarios of daily usage. Certain parameters need to be variable during the test to make a statement about the product. In our test the parameters are the different block sizes. It defines the size in KBytes which is written/read on the drive during a transaction.
With this method one can test the reading and writing of either small and big files. In a normal personal computer environment you usually don't find many files smaller than 16 KByte. The relative amount of small files is much bigger on a mail or database server. Therefore tests with small block sizes are of interest for database-based applications.
In bigger RAID arrays the hard disk cache is usually disabled and the RAID-Controller takes over the job of caching. Exactly in such setups hard drives need to be very fast when reading or writing small amounts of data. Sequential throughput isn't interesting in this case.
| Page 1 - Introduction | Page 5 - Sequential read/write |
| Page 2 - Specifications | Page 6 - Random read/write |
| Page 3 - Preview | Page 7 - Fazit |
| Page 4 - How do we test? |
Discuss this article in the forum [pagebreak]
iozone sequential write/read KByte/s
iozone KByte/s, sequential write |
|
| 16 KByte | |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 42'721 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 31'997 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 31'803 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 30'524 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 16'927 |
| 32 KByte | |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 75'229 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 32'069 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 31'299 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 30'621 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 16'945 |
| 64 KByte | |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 60'110 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 32'378 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 31'896 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 30'298 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 16'664 |
| 128 KByte | |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 72'402 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 31'823 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 31'703 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 30'360 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 16'980 |
| 256 KByte | |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 80'631 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 32'169 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 32'028 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 31'008 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 17'019 |
| 512 KByte | |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 82'139 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 31'866 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 30'056 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 27'015 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 18'445 |
iozone KByte/s, sequential read |
|
| 16 KByte | |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 30'254 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 29'081 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 28'746 |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 18'555 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 15'125 |
| 32 KByte | |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 29'615 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 29'060 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 28'174 |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 16'271 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 15'290 |
| 64 KByte | |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 29'428 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 28'397 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 26'774 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 14'560 |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 13'145 |
| 128 KByte | |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 36'665 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 29'320 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 28'897 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 28'219 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 15'037 |
| 256 KByte | |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 45'356 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 29'369 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 29'152 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 28'721 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 15'149 |
| 512 KByte | |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 65'188 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 30'011 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 28'869 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 27'691 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 15'236 |
| Page 1 - Introduction | Page 5 - Sequential read/write |
| Page 2 - Specifications | Page 6 - Random read/write |
| Page 3 - Preview | Page 7 - Fazit |
| Page 4 - How do we test? |
Discuss this article in the forum [pagebreak]
iozone random write/read KByte/s
iozone KByte/s, random write |
|
| 16 KByte | |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 6'684 |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 5'049 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 4'569 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 4'457 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 4'428 |
| 32 KByte | |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 10'282 |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 9'112 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 7'652 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 7'120 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 6'280 |
| 64 KByte | |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 16'713 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 12'360 |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 12'105 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 11'847 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 8'757 |
| 128 KByte | |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 23'281 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 19'243 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 18'935 |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 18'460 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 11'544 |
| 256 KByte | |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 31'117 |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 29'524 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 27'501 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 27'034 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 14'650 |
| 512 KByte | |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 41'020 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 31'595 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 31'230 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 30'992 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 16'936 |
iozone KByte/s, random read |
|
| 16 KByte | |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 1'801 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 1'719 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 1'654 |
| Freecom 640 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 1'509 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 1'357 |
| 32 KByte | |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 3'580 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 3'476 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 3'053 |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 2'729 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 2'378 |
| 64 KByte | |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 6'534 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 6'487 |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 5'706 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 5'473 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 3'952 |
| 128 KByte | |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 11'136 |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 10'648 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 10'428 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 8'932 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 6'648 |
| 256 KByte | |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 18'248 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 14'274 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 12'830 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 10'671 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 8'635 |
| 512 KByte | |
| Freecom 600 GByte Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 | 30'265 |
| Samsung Story Station 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 20'807 |
| IN WIN AMMO, 250 GByte 2.5'' USB 2.0 | 20'122 |
| Western Digital Elements 1.5 TByte 3.5'' USB 2.0 | 15'866 |
| Samsung S1 120 GByte 1.8'' USB 2.0 | 10'431 |
| Page 1 - Introduction | Page 5 - Sequential read/write |
| Page 2 - Specifications | Page 6 - Random read/write |
| Page 3 - Preview | Page 7 - Fazit |
| Page 4 - How do we test? |
Discuss this article in the forum [pagebreak]
Conclusion
With the Mobile Drive XXS Leather, Freecom shows an external hard drive that scores with a very decent design. The leather casing really looks nice. What one should be aware of is that the leather casing doesn't provide a high level of protections. In this means putting the drive on the table in a rough manner can damage the head inside the hard drive.
If
you connect the Mobile Drive XXS Leather with your computer you'll notice that next you
your rig the hard drive is unhearable. Having the drive under load for several
hours doesn't result in high operating temperatures. The drive stays hand warm.
If we take a closer look at the performance values, we see that sequential
throughput reaches about 80 MByte/s. This means that you can shovel huge amount
of data within reasonable time.
If you are looking for an external drive which does a good job and looks decent, Freecoms Mobile Drive XXS Leather will be a good choice.
The Freecom Mobile Drive XXS Leather will be available for about CHF 80.- (est. EUR 67.-)
The Freecom Mobile Drive XXS Leather USB 3.0 with 640 Gigabyte gets good four out of five stars.
| Page 1 - Introduction | Page 5 - Sequential read/write |
| Page 2 - Specifications | Page 6 - Random read/write |
| Page 3 - Preview | Page 7 - Fazit |
| Page 4 - How do we test? |
Discuss this article in the forum
Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch