System Setup
For testing we used the following hardware:
- Asus A8N-E Motherboard
- AMD Athlon 64 3800+ Socket 939
- MGE 500 Watt PSU
- 2 x Trandscend 512 DDR PC-3200
- BFG Geforce 7300 GS
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 250 GB
Our operating system of choice for this test was Windows XP Pro with all the latest patches.
Performance Test
Now that everything is in place, it’s time to put this drive enclosure to the test. We’ll kick off with benchmarks using HD Tach to get some numbers for the USB speed of the enclosure. Then, we’ll measure the enclosure’s eSATA capabilities. The Seagate drive we will be using today has an approximate sustained rate of 60 MB/S when directly connected to a SATA-II interface on the Asus board. With that knowledge, let us begin the tests!
HD Tach – USB
As you can see from the above graph, the USB test is almost a completely straight line which shows us that USB 2.0 simply is not fast enough to fully utilize the full bandwidth of the hard drive. We know this because the speed of sequential reads changes across the disk platter, so if we were fully utilizing the full speed of the drive we would have some slowdown near the end of the drive platter. In other words, the line should be gradually heading downwards. USB 2.0 still manages to pull off a handsome 33 MB/s rate, which is a good speed and can be duplicated on any system with said port.
HD Tach – eSATA
Now, the eSATA connection isn’t as pervasive as USB, but as new systems roll off the assembly line, we should see it more and more on desktop and even laptop computers. Based on the graphm eSata is finally able to utilise the drive’s bandwidth enough that we can see the slowdown in sequential reads across the disk platter. This means the bottleneck is typically the disk itself, which is good because it is not the interface. So how fast does it go? On our 250 GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA Hard Drive installed into the MX-1, we topped out at 129 MB/s.How’s The Temperature In This Drive?
As an actively cooled enclosure, noise is sometimes a problem, however, the fan spins quietly and is unnoticeable against the hard drive noises. On average, we noticed a temperature drop of five degrees celsius. Since a cool drive is a happy drive, we’re pretty happy with the drop in temperature inside the MX-1.
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