9. Benchmark Results

For our test, we made a 1:1 copy of our notebook's brimful hard drive (IBM Travelstar 40GN, 20 GB partition size, NTFS) via USB 2.0 interface. As our upgrade drive, we used a Hitachi IBM Travelstar 40GNX.

The first round of measurements was taken under Windows XP Professional. The next round was recorded after booting Clone EZ directly from the CD (under Linux).

As our charts show, a backup under Linux takes three times as long as under Windows XP, since the median data transfer rate was only a meager 3 MB/s.

To find out whether Apricorn's upgrade kit actually saves the user time, we also decided to duplicate our drive the "classical" way. To that end, we made it the master on the secondary IDE channel of a desktop PC. We then created an image on the PC's slave drive using DiskImage 2002. At first glance, this method seems to be much faster. Since the image also has to be restored to the new drive in the next step, the cloning process took about 48 minutes. That would equal a net data transfer rate of about six to seven megaBytes per second.