Seagate ST 5.0GB Pocket Hard Drive

Performance:

The system setup used for testing the Seagate 5.0GB Pocket Hard Drive contained the following system specifications:

Bundled with the Seagate Pocket Hard Drives is a CD that contains the Microsoft Windows 98 drivers as well as a Windows utility from Seagate dubbed Toolkit. Seagate's Toolkit software is for Windows only and allows the drive to be password protected as well as offering other nifty features. Using Fedora Core 5, as the drive was connected it was automatically mounted as "No Name". Browsing the directory, it had the Toolkit.exe files as well as related files and a HTML user's guide. Of course, alternative OS users can simply delete these unneeded files.

Using Fedora Core 5 Test 3 and the Linux 2.6.15 kernel, there were no problems when it came to the device's detection or operation within Linux. The drive had worked accordingly with no signs of compatibility issues. The drive was also tested with Fedora Core 4 combined with earlier Linux 2.6 kernels, and had offered no apparent issues when it came to compatibility. In addition to benchmarking the Seagate 5.0GB drive, we also tested the Corsair Flash Voyager 4GB and Hitachi Travelstar HTS541080G9AT00 (80GB, 5400RPM, 8MB) drive inside of a SilverStone Storage MS02 enclosure. For testing the device, we used hdparm (which alleviates the file system overhead), copying a single large file over to the device, and measuring the time to copy the file placed on the hard drive into a different location on the same drive. With each of the devices, the portable media devices were formatted to FAT32 using QtParted v0.4.5. The file used during the single copy test was America's Army v2.5.0 for Linux with full installer (775.8MB).