Testing:
A system featuring an Abit IP-35E motherboard, Intel Q6600 quad core processor, 2GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR2 memory, and the Windows XP Professional operating system was used to test the
Mapower MAP-TB32 dual SATA RAID enclosure.
For the testing portion of this review I paired the drive enclosure with a pair of Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA, 7200 RPM, 16MB cache drives formatted to NTFS. These hard drives are solid performers and relatively inexpensive. The image below shows the hard drives used.
I used HDTune 2.55 to measure enclosure performance for the following modes: SPAN, RAID-0, RAID-1 and SAFE-33. These results were recorded for both the ESATA connection and the USB2.0 connection. Benchmarking data for the SAFE-50 mode and Normal mode have both been omitted because numbers for both of them are similar to benchmark data for other modes. SAFE-33 and SAFE-50 are similar and Normal and SPAN are identical. I will also be comparing these benchmarks with those of the
Kingwin EL-35EU-SBL enclosure. Although the Kingwin EL-35EU-SBL is only a single drive enclosure, I used one of the same hard drives while benchmarking it and it will give us a good idea just how the Mapower's performance stacks up to other enclosures on the market.
We will first look at the USB 2.0 data. The first two images show USB 2.0 benchmark data for Mapower's TB32CS in SPAN (below left) and RAID-0 (below right).
The next two images show USB 2.0 benchmark data for Mapower's TB32CS in RAID-1 (below left) and the Kingwin-EL-35EU-SBL (below right).
Notice that the SPAN mode and RAID-1 mode benchmarks are nearly identical, while the RAID-0 benchmark shows a small improvement in performance. The trade off for this small gain in performance is slightly more CPU usage. None of these benchmarks even comes close to the USB 2.0 performance of the Kingwin enclosure.
