Testing:

The bulk of testing will be focused on transfer rates in the various drive configurations, but first we'll check out the power consumption of the ICY DOCK ICYRaid enclosure. The ICYRaid was plugged in to a Seasonic Power Angel monitoring device in order to get real time information on the electrical current drawn while in use. The device was tested while active - reading and writing data while also running ATTO Disk Benchmark, and with the device idle - where it is fully powered up but with no active data transfers.



What we see is that the device draws just 13W while idle and 18W while active. These are both fairly low, and almost identical to what a 2-bay Thecus 2310 NAS server did when it was tested.

Next up I tested the ICYRaid using CrystalDiskMark and ATTO's Disk Benchmark with the device configured in each of its operating modes...

» Big - the two 2TB drives were combined to show as one 4TB volume
» JBOD - the two 2TB drives were available individually as 2TB volumes (only one was chosen for testing)
» RAID 1 - the two 2TB drives were mirrored as one 2TB volume
» RAID 0 - the two 2TB drives were striped as one 4TB volume

With CrystalDiskMark, the unts of measure are MB/s, and higher is better.

We'll start by looking at CrystalDiskMark's Sequential Read results, where we see some impressive numbers, especially while in RAID 0. RAID 0 speeds exceeded 240MB/s, while speeds for the other 3 modes were all around 185MB/s.



Looking at the Sequential Write Results we see that things are about as impressive, which is nice since you sometimes see a bigger drop on the write side of things. RAID 0 was just over 200MB/s, while the other three modes were between 170-180MB/s.



512K Reads show a drop in performance, but that is to be expected. Actually, the drop isn't as bad as I expected, except for whatever happened on RAID 0. Just keep in mind - all of these speeds are far faster than anything you would get on USB 2.0!



512K Writes are up next, and again we see that RAID 1, Big, and JBOD all look about the same at approximately 85MB/s. RAID 0 tops 105MB/s.