MyBook 3.0 3TB Review: Hard Drive Stress Test?

[GWestphal]

I just got a 3TB WD drive and I'm looking to stress test it to make sure it doesn't crap out after a short while. Are there any programs for OS X that will do this? Google didn't point me to anything.

Also a brief note on the MyBook 3.0 3TB drive. It's USB 3.0 and with modbin's patch it works great. I'm using it on SIIG 2 port controller card with NEC chip. With GUID partition it actually formats to 2.99TB usable space. The unit it's self does have a power button on the back which is a big improvement over the older models. I benched it on my P35-DS3L system.

Connected via USB 2.0:
Write: 26.8 MB/s
Read: 32.6 MB/s

Connected via USB 3.0:
Write: 88.9 MB/s
Read: 123.4 MB/s

I'm quite pleased with the power button addition, the actual formatted capacity, and the speed. It's nearly silent as well and the activity light is small, but it is white so a bit brighter than the old blue LEDs they used, some electrical tape can fix that though.

Overall: I'd give it a 8/10 for this product.

 

[GWestphal]

After search for a long while more, I found a program called DiskTester. It runs quite a comprehensive write test. It writes 5 patterns of 0s and 1s to each 512MB block of the disk 3 times. Looks like its going to take 2 days to run. Then I'll have to use the SMART Utility program to check the SMART status, since OS X is not good about that stuff.

 

[Emulex]

can you compare system utilization and latency when using usb 3.0 versus say esata?

usb2.0 was a serious drag on the i/o subsystem compared to a REAL ESATA (not a usb esata) port.

 

[GWestphal]

It's running a stress test right now for the next few days, so I can't check at the moment. I can't compare the same disk because the MyBook 3.0 is USB 3.0 only. Currently while running DiskTester over USB 3.0, my system CPU percentage is sitting at 32% on a Q6600 with kernel_task taking 104% and my wireless ralink taking 24% all other processes taking less than 1%. I'm not sure how that compares to an idle system unfortunately.

The system is quite responsive, I can run Fusion and all sorts of other apps no problem, just as if I wasn't running anything in the background. I do have quad cores and 8GB of RAM though.

The actually usb 3.0 disk I/O is about 710 I/Ops during writes cycles and 975 IOps during read cycles. It's been keeping solid at W:88MB R:120MB for the past 4.25 TB of writes.

There might be something weird with the driver though, It says space utilized is 2.99 TB and Space free is 7.78GB. I'm guessing those are switched in the plist since the drive should be empty.

 

[GWestphal]

Well it finished it's 15 TB stress test with no errors (YAY!) I never heard the drive and it is barely warm during the 3 day period.

Just checked system resources at idle and USB 3.0 on OS X does take a lot of resources.

Idle: 6% USB 3.0 Writes: 32% so about 25% give or take, though I never had any kind of lag when doing other things like downloading, surfing, VM.

 

[GWestphal]

I'm transferring my data from a USB 2.0 enclosure to the MyBook 3.0 and the CPU usage is at about 15%.

 

[Emulex]

hmm i will have to try a expresscard/34 esata to see if its better than usb 3.0 on my macbook