Maxtor provided us with two similar 5400 rpm external hard drives, the USB 2.0-based Personal Storage 3000LE and the FireWire-based External Storage 3000XT. With our 1.3-GHz Pentium 4 test system equipped with 1GB of PC800 RDRAM, we loaded up SuperSpeed Software's RamDisk XP Pro and created a 700MB virtual hard drive. The low latency of our RAM disk as well as its solid-state performance allowed us focus on the performance of each interface using the similar external drives.
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