I as you can see from an earlier post, I am working on finding the best home for my VMware guest disk file on my MacBook Pro. The LaCie BigDisk Extreme+ is looking like the best choice among hard disks but I wanted to know how the LaCie compares to the internal MacBook Pro drive. I have the latest "ultimate" configuration which includes the 7200 rpm 200 GB drive.
This time around, I decided to use the industry-standard Mac benchmarking program XBench. This is an excellent freeware utility that measures your Mac's performance in all of the critical areas: CPU, memory, disk, graphics card, etc. I ran XBench against all of my disks in all configurations and the results, quite frankly, were stunning and unexpected.
You can view the full XBench results in this screenshot:
XBench provides its results in a "score" which, for disks, is computed from the scores of the individual sequential and random disk access tests.
Again, the disks used are:
- Internal MacBook drive: 200 GB at 7200 rpm
These are the results, rolled up to summaries of sequential and random for each disk:
- Macintosh HD - Score: 40.64 (Sequential: 47.90, Random: 29.00)
Incredible. As you can see, the LaCie external drive performed better in XBench disk tests using both FireWire 400 and FireWire 800:
- Random access was almost twice as fast to the external LaCie drive over both FW 400 and FW 800 than the internal disk
Hands down, using a FireWire 800 drive that spins at 7200 rpm like the LaCie BigDisk Extreme+ is the way to go with VM guests. Now...how to find such a drive in a portable format that runs off of the MacBook???
UPDATED: Found it! And here is why the LaCie is so fast!