Gigabyte BRIX

Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. (who uses the name Jìjiā Kējì in Chinese), is a manufacturer and distributor of computer hardware products. Gigabyte makes motherboards, graphics cards, desktop mini-PCs, laptops, peripherals and components. Gigabyte mini-PC brand is BRIX; Gigabyte BRIX computers are sold both as barebones and as fully configured systems.

• Gigabyte's Web site lists more than 100 models of barebone Brix mini-PCs.
• Apparently the Taiwanese manufacturer could never decide whether its Englished name should be styled GIGABYTE or GIGA-BYTE Technology Co., Ltd.

About itself, Gigabyte says that

GIGABYTE is always consumer-oriented from the very beginning of product design to the end of value chain. With the focus on consumer needs, the delivery of customer experiences has been transformed into tangible and understood customer cares. Therefore, GIGABYTE has integrated the best quality of components to ensure outstanding stability and reliability and also built up a complete service network with hundreds of customer service centers around the globe. Behind everything we do is a clear focus on what our customers value. GIGABYTE has kept staying one step ahead of consumer desires to create unique connections and pursue your smile of satisfaction.
(Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd., About Us, translation from classical Chinese poetry by the anonymous PR department of Gigabyte; retrieved on 11 June 2018.)

 Gigabyte Brix GB-BACE-3000 is a black metal box, 56.1 × 107.6 × 114.4mm, featuring:

• One two-core two-thread Intel Celeron N3000 processor;
• One 2.5″ SATA bay for a hard disk or SSD, either 7.0 or 9.5 mm thick;
• One DDR3L 1.35 V SODIMM slot, up to 8 GB;
• One Intel IEEE 802.11 ac, dual band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 NGFF M.2 card;
• One built-in Realtek RTL8111H gigabit Ethernet card;
• Four USB 3.0 ports, one RJ-45 port, one VGA port, one HDMI port, one audio-out and one microphone-in 3.5 mm jack sockets.

The Celeron N3000 is one of Intel's "products formerly Braswell". Introduced in Q1 2015, it's a 64 bit processor; a 14 nm part, it has 2 cores / 2 threads (that is, no hyperthreading), works at 1.04 GHz (with single-core burst up to 2.08 GHz), has a splendid TDP of 4 W, and includes VT-x with Extended Page Tables, hardware AES support, and Intel HD Graphics for Intel Celeron Processor N3000 Series, which, Wikipedia assures me, it's a form of Intel HD Graphics 400.

WD Elements SE 4TB

The Western Digital Elements SE is a 2.5″ inch portable external hard disk, available in multiple capacities. It has the traditional "rounded" shape of WD portable external hard disks, unlike the recent models of WD My Passport disks which have transitioned to a sharp-cornered rectangular enclosure; this makes it a natural fit for the fabled WD Nomad rugged disk cases of old.

• Dimensions: 110 × 81.5 × 21 mm for the 2TB and 4TB variants; the 1TB variant is only 12.8 mm thick.
• Weight: about 250 g (4TB), down to about 130 g (1TB).
• Model: WDBJRT0040BBK-WESN (4TB), or WDBJRT0020BBK-WESN (2TB), or WDBJRT0010BBK-WESN (1TB).

The 4TB WD Elements SE has physical sectors of 4 KiB, but presents to the host system logical sectors of 512 bytes; this makes it a 512e Advanced Format disk, which helps with compatibility with more simple-minded operating systems; because the disk presents 512 byte logical sectors, it must be formatted with the GPT partitioning scheme. The disk has 7,813,969,920 logical sectors, which means that its capacity is 4,000,752,599,040 bytes (3.64 TiB). Crystal Dew World's CrystalDiskInfo says that the disk spins at 5400 rpm.

C:\> fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo A:
...
Number Sectors :                  0x00000001d1bfa7ff
Total Clusters :                  0x000000003a37f4ff
Free Clusters  :                  0x0000000027ae5d79
Total Reserved :                  0x0000000000000000
Bytes Per Sector  :               512
Bytes Per Physical Sector :       4096
...

The performances as measured CrystalDiskMark are consistent with a 5400 rpm disk with an USB 3.0 connection. Sequential read speed is about 87 MB/sec (or about 83 MiB/sec in binary units); for small random accesses the read speed drops to about 0.5 MB/sec, corresponding to a respectable 133 IOPS. (The write speed as measured by CrystalDiskMark for small random accesses is unrealistic and should not be taken into account.)

In a practical test, reading 2000 photos totalling 15 GB (13.9 GiB) took 236 seconds, coming to 63.6 MB/sec or 60.6 MiB/sec.