Performance
After seven hours of initialization (yes, and I did that more than once), we’ve got an array that is just under 3 TBs, and we were ready to see what this four drive monster could do in the benchmarks with RAID 5. But before we get into that, we’ll lay down the single drive benchmarks for your reference on our Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1 TB SATA Drives.
Now that we’ve seen the read and write speeds of the single Seagate ES.2 1TB drive, let’s see how well or not so well the T4H CR does against a single drive. Now, keep in mind, RAID 5 is built for data redundancy so it will be interesting to see what kind of performance hit, if any there is vs single drive performance.
eSATA Performance
Connecting up the eSATA connector, we ran another set of read and write tests, this time on the T4H CR and the four drives running in RAID 5 inside. Let’s see how it did:
It’s definitely no speed demon that’s for sure. In fact, it fails to match the single drive speeds in all categories (with the exception of CPU usage in write speeds). I had thought that maybe it would perform better if we had used smaller drives and setup a RAID 0 array, but even Enhance Technology’s own benchmarks would beg to differ as they show minimal performance gains between RAID 5 and RAID 0. I even tried plugging the T4H CR into a different SATA port, but we only got similar results. Let’s keep rolling I guess!
Firewire 800 Performance
As expected, Firewire 800 performance is worse than eSATA performance, however, disk access times and CPU usage are in favour of Firewire 800 in both the read and the write tests.
Firewire 400 Performance
I expected Firewire 400 performance to be worse than Firewire 800 performance. Instead, I got some really strange results where they were nearly identical except for one thing: Firewire 800 performed worse than Firewire 400 in minimum read and write speeds. Just to be sure that nothing was wrong with my controller card, a SIIG PCI-Express Firewire 800/400 card, I hooked up a Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition via Firewire 400 and 800 and benched that on the same card. I got what I expected which was far superior Firewire 800 performance over Firewire 400. Could this have something to do with the fact that the controller onboard could only allow access to 2TB total?
USB 2.0 Performance
As expected, USB 2.0 performance sits at the bottom of the scale. It’s faster than a USB Flash Drive, for sure, but it’s nothing worth writing home about. It does have the lowest CPU utilization of any USB based drive that I’ve tested so far so write home about that if you will.
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