Introduction

AXIOMTEK is a manufacturer of storage solutions, including both SOHO and enterprise storage solutions as well as a few other products outside the storage realm. As we dig deeper in the area of external and networked storage, we are beginning to see that this area is not just limited to applications for the corporate world, which cost thousands of dollars, but it includes desktop and small office products as well. AXIOMTEK brings all of these solutions to consumers along with about 15 years of experience.

Recently, AXIOMTEK has brought to our attention their ExBoot line of 3.5” external desktop hard drives. We had a chance to look at their 80GB version of the ExBoot, which looks to be aimed at the typical home user due to its capacity and its single USB 2.0 interface.

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Our look at both the AcomData E5 and Seagate’s 120GB brought us some results to which we can compare our future benchmark results and we will do just that. Take a look at how the ExBoot compares to these higher capacity drives.



The 80GB ExBoot External Drive

It would be a slight understatement if we said that the ExBoot was nothing special to look at. In its off-state, it looks like a normal 3.5” aluminum hard drive case with curves. However, when in the “on” state, the lights come up. Just behind the front plate of the enclosure, we see a transparent plastic that allows the multi-color, color-cycling LEDs to shine through. The button for the PushButton backup on the front bezel is also clear to allow this effect. The case features a large ExBoot logo on the right side in blue and gray.

Bezel of ExBoot

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Rear of ExBoot

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The 80GB ExBoot model carries a USB 2.0 interface that is standard on most external desktop drives these days. It would have been nice to see the FireWire option as well, but considering that this is the lower end model in the series, we let that slide. The rear panel also features an on/off switch for the fan, which is a nice feature. This allows the drive to be cooled when needed, but also allows the external drive to run in silent mode. However, even in the “On” mode, the fan is fairly silent.

The inside of the ExBoot consists of a Western Digital WD800BB 80GB hard drive with a 7200RPM spindle speed and 2MB buffer.

The following 4 models are available from AXIOMTEK in the 3.5” size:

Configurations for AXIOMTEK's External Drives
Model No.	Capacity	Rotational Speed	Interface Transfer Rate
EXB-0131/080	80 GB	7200 RPM	USB 2.0: Up to 480 Mbps (60 Megabytes/s**).
EXB-0131/160	160 GB	7200 RPM
EXB-0131/250	250 GB	7200 RPM
EXB-0131/400	400 GB	7200 RPM

*Information in the table has been taken straight from the ExBoot website.
**Theoretical limit. Actual transfer rates may differ.



The Software

AXIOMTEK's backup software is somewhat trivial if you're looking for a full featured backup package. Seeing that this is the "Professional" version, it lacks the ability to configure the predefined backup that will be initiated by the PushButton backup feature. Scheduling backups are simple to do, but the only option available is a full drive backup. Finding that out, we better not have more than about 74GB of data on the drive that we are archiving.

What's included

Main ExBoot backup software screen

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Point-In-Time recovery

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System Tray Launcher

A feature that we found extremely useful was the ability to boot off the ExBoot if the primary boot drive failed. This, of course, is only available if your motherboard supports booting from USB devices.



The Test

Our list of tests for external drives has many of the benchmarks as our internal hard disk drive, but we are focusing more on file system tasks, since external devices are mainly used for archival. We have not changed our test bed from our usual storage platform. Take a look at the details.

AXIOMTEK ExBoot 80GB External Storage/Backup Test Bed
Processor:	AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2GHz, 512KB L2 Cache, Socket 939)
Motherboard/Chipset Drivers:	Giga-Byte GA-K8NXP-SLI nForce4 (v6.66)
Hard Disk Drive(s):	Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB
RAM:	1GB Corsair XMS4400 (2x512MB)
Video Card:	NVIDIA 6600GT 128MB SLI Edition (Single card)

Our test methods are as follows:

WinBench 99 – transfer rates over the disk surface, disk access time, and CPU utilization

HDTach – Sequential read speeds and burst speeds

Real World File System Task Tests – timed tests of basic file system tasks including zipping/unzipping and copying files from a higher performance SATA drive to the external device, as well as within the external device

Real World Multitasking Test – timed tests of basic multitasking processes, timing a file zip operation while copying a larger 4.5GB file



WinBench 99

We have extended our WinBench 99 portion of our benchmarks to include not only the Disk Transfer Rate tests, but also a couple of other disk performance related tests including Disk Access Time and CPU Utilization. As we present our results, we will explain how each test is relevant in our methodology.

Disk Transfer Rate

In the past, we have just given the beginning and ending transfer rates, which doesn’t really show the performance of the entire disk because there is so much more in between that we are not reporting. Our new method includes a graph:

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The WinBench 99 transfer rate test reports results that are extremely sporadic. Starting at a rate of 28.1 MB/sec, the ExBoot drive produces transfer rates anywhere between 26-31MB/sec. Later, we’ll see that HDTach produces similar results.

Disk Access Time

WinBench 99 also has a Disk Access Time test that gives us the summation of the latency, seek time, as well as any overhead involved in seeking data across the disk.

The 13.9ms access time is quicker than Seagate’s 15ms access time for the 120GB version of their external drive. The ExBoot uses the Western Digital WD800BB drive with 2MB of cache and a 7200RPM rotational speed. The WD800BB is designed with triple 27GB platters, so it’s a wonder why the access times were lower than the Seagate drive.

Disk CPU Utilization

The disk CPU utilization test measures the CPU usage while the hard drive transfers data at a rate of 4KB/sec. While transferring data, our test bed utilizes about 77% of the CPU time on average.

This figure looks to be around the ballpark of CPU consumption for USB based drives.



HDTach 3

HDTach provides another look into the transfer rates of a disk drive similar to WinBench 99’s transfer rate test. We perform three runs of HDTach to see if there is any variance in the results. For the 80GB ExBoot unit, we received the same results.

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Compared to the Seagate 120GB external drive, the 80GB ExBoot is all over the place in HDTach’s sequential read speed test like WinBench 99’s transfer rate test. HDTach reports an average read speed of 28.6MB/sec as well as a 32.8MB/sec burst speed.



Real World Tests – File System Performance

For our Real World File System Performance tests, we have taken the original tests and tailored them for external drives. More specifically, instead of just measuring the time that it takes to copy, zip, and unzip within the same drive, we measure the time that it takes to perform these tasks from a SATA drive to the external device.

File Copy Operations

File Copy – One 300MB File, seconds, lower is better
	Within Drive	To Drive (From SATA)
AcomData E5 320GB (USB)	32.072	11.191
AcomData E5 320GB (FireWire 400)	20.573	11.334
ExBoot 80GB USB	30.495	9.828
Seagate 120GB USB	28.539	11.750

The E5 has no competition just yet with its FireWire interface when copying files within the drive. And though the ExBoot shows lower file copy times to the drive, the others are not far behind. Two seconds make very little difference here, but the advantage is still given to the ExBoot here.

File Copy – Three Hundred 1MB Files, seconds, lower is better
	Within Drive	To Drive (From SATA)
AcomData E5 320GB (USB)	13.298	13.219
AcomData E5 320GB (FireWire 400)	12.962	12.813
ExBoot 80GB USB	14.526	14.727
Seagate 120GB USB	13.516	13.711

The file copy time for three hundred 1MB files are extremely close, which tells us that the USB interface is the major bottleneck, as we would expect it to be.


File Zip Operations

File Zip – One 300MB File, seconds, lower is better
	Within Drive	To Drive (From SATA)
AcomData E5 320GB (USB)	69.195	70.734
AcomData E5 320GB (FireWire 400)	67.219	67.586
ExBoot 80GB USB	66.885	67.406
Seagate 120GB USB	67.688	67.443

File Zip – Three Hundred 1MB Files, seconds, lower is better
	Within Drive	To Drive (From SATA)
AcomData E5 320GB (USB)	71.775	71.621
AcomData E5 320GB (FireWire 400)	70.583	70.620
ExBoot 80GB USB	67.344	67.667
Seagate 120GB USB	68.906	70.805

File UnZip Operations

File Unzip – One 300MB File, seconds, lower is better
	Within Drive	To Drive (From SATA)
AcomData E5 320GB (USB)	15.761	15.699
AcomData E5 320GB (FireWire 400)	14.427	14.401
ExBoot 80GB USB	15.229	15.647
Seagate 120GB USB	15.476	15.485

File Unzip – Three Hundred 1MB Files, seconds, lower is better
	Within Drive	To Drive (From SATA)
AcomData E5 320GB (USB)	16.196	16.008
AcomData E5 320GB (FireWire 400)	14.901	14.995
ExBoot 80GB USB	16.021	16.679
Seagate 120GB USB	15.664	15.618

Real World Tests – Multitasking Performance

We apply the same changes to our Real World Multitasking Performance tests and have also modified the test to relate to typical external storage device uses. We now measure the time that it takes to zip a single 300MB file while copying a 4.5GB file to the external device from a SATA drive.

Multitasking – 4GB File Copy + 300MB File Zip, seconds, lower is better
	Within Drive	To Drive (From SATA)	Difference
AcomData E5 320GB (USB)	186.586	199.154	12.568
AcomData E5 320GB (FireWire 400)	173.453	187.438	13.985
ExBoot 80GB USB	102.296	107.594	5.298
Seagate 120GB USB	199.416	197.086	2.330

Surprisingly, the ExBoot takes the lead here, chopping off up to 90 seconds to zip a 300MB file to the drive while copying a 4GB file to the drive at the same time. We are surprised to see this with the ExBoot holding a drive that has lower density platters and a smaller buffer.


Final Thoughts

With a capacity of 80GB, the ExBoot is a good choice for those who are looking for a drive that will back up their smaller home PC drives. This drive, however, would not fit a small business, or even the average multimedia fanatic, as 80GB of hard disk space is becoming less common, even at home.

The performance of the drive surprised us, seeing that the WD800BB uses three 27GB platters, a much lower density than what the drives in the E5 and Seagate’s 120GB drive use. The single benchmark that gave us comfort was the last multitasking test where we zipped a 300MB file to the drive from our SATA test bed drive while copying a 4GB file to the drive as well. The time to zip the file to the drive took almost 90 seconds less compared to the Seagate 120GB and even shorter than 90 seconds compared to the E5’s USB interface.

The software is mediocre at best. It does its job in doing a full backup during its schedules, but it does not allows us to choose what files we want backed up, but rather a single option to backup/restore an entire volume. This is trouble if your source drive is larger than 74GB. The PushButton backup assignment is also frustrating, in that we cannot assign a predefined backup to the button. The E5’s bundled Retrospect Express and the Bounceback Express that came with the Seagate drive were fullly featured, even with their “Express” naming convention. We were able to choose what files we wanted to back up instead of having our options limited.

The ExBoot 80GB has a low capacity and software that just barely does its job. There are a handful of drives out there, if not more, that have full-featured software packages and larger capacities that can do their job much more efficiently, and for this reason, we cannot recommend this drive to even the average user.