Performance

USB 3.0

Taking a look at the USB 3.0 interface, it is obviously held back by the hard drive. Not even the newest SATA-III SSDs are able to hit the maximum of 640 MB/s the USB 3.0 interface is capable of. That said, it is better than other USB 3.0 drives we have benched in the past.


ATTO shows performance well over 100 MB/s in both read and write, as the benchmark stays within the inner circle of the platters. Nevertheless, the Toshiba drive does a great job considering it is only 5400 RPM.

USB 2.0

USB 2.0 performance is a straight line, as the internal drive never becomes slower than the interface itself. This is a good thing and the Stream S10 manages to deliver over 35.2 MB/s read and a very good 30.7 MB/s write performance. So even if you do not own USB 3.0 yet, the Stream S10 is a good choice. This performance puts the drive in the higher half of our fairly large USB 2.0 performance line-up. In real life you will not really notice the slight difference in speed between the faster ones. In terms of writes the unit actually beats the ADATA CH11 USB 3.0 hard drive, but is beaten by the Vantec 1TB Store'n'Go USB 3.0.






ATTO gives us a similar image, but the read speed is similar, even though the benchmark doesn't break 35 MB/s in terms of read performance. This is due to the little ripple we can see in HDTach. This boosts the overall score to above the 35 MB/s mark.