iPod Speed Revisited

On Wednesday we posted results from running ATTO's ExpressPro Tools benchmark on the iPOD's 5 GB iPod FireWire drive in drive mode. We compared the results with those from our 4 GB VST Bus-Powered FireWire drive and our TiBook's internal 20 GB ATA hard drive. We did so using Classic Mode in Mac OS X set at a maximum transfer size of 8 MB and a sample size of 2. We posted the average of three runs.

Well, several readers questioned the absolute values in MB/sec of our results for Peak Read and Write plus Sustained Read as being too high. Several asked if we had accidentally slipped a decimal point. Unfortunately, the answer is that the ATTO benchmark may not give accurate results under Mac OS X 10.1 (or 10.1.1 since we rechecked). We were so interested in the relative results that it failed to dawn on us that the absolute rates reported by the ATTO benchmark, except for sustained write, were unreasonably high. We ran the ATTO benchmark again under Mac OS 9.2.1--here are the results:

Average Hard Disk Speed in MB/sec

Test	iPod	VST	Internal
Peak Read	10.6	9.0	43.1
Sustained Read	9.4	9.0	15.0
Peak Write	8.5	9.1	15.5
Sustained Write	8.2	9.0	14.7

The results are similar in many ways to those produced under Mac OS X 10.1 Classic mode. The iPod and VST are comparable. While the iPod is slightly faster than the VST at reading it is slightly slower at writing. The internal 20 GB ATA drive is faster than both external FireWire drives. The key point is that the iPod is no slouch according to the ATTO ExpresssPro Tools benchmark. It is a legitimate alternative portable FireWire drive.