Testing:
Testing the Icy Dock MB124E External Firewire 2.5" Drive Enclosure consisted of running it through a series of benchmarks intended to evaluate the performance of the hard drive inside.
As a point of reference, the MB124E will be tested head-to-head against another 2.5" drive enclosure, but this one is USB 2.0 only. The image below shows the two contenders; the Icy Dock Firewire enclosure on the left, and a Young Micro USB 2.0 enclosure on the right. This is the first size reference we get in regards to the MB124E, and as you can see it is obviously not the most compact enclosure you can get for a 2.5" drive!
The USB enclosure does not require an external power supply, and much to my delight the power supply was unnecessary during testing. You will need it for systems that don't provide enough power over the Firewire connection, but on a typical desktop you will be able to leave the power adapter in the box.
The drive used for testing was freshly formatted before use in either enclosure, and it has the following specifications: Hitachi DK23EA-30, 30GB, 4200 RPM, 2.5" drive.
The first test run was the SiSoft Sandra 2007 Physical Disks benchmark. Two values were extracted from the results of this test; one being the Drive Index (in units of MB/s), and the other being the Random Access Time (in units of ms). Higher values are desirable for Drive Index, while lower values are available for Random Access Time.
As you can see from the results above, this test indicates that the MB124E isn't particularly fast! The Drive Index represents an analysis of drive speed, and the USB 2.0 enclosure was exactly twice as fast (and about as fast as I was expecting)! Realizing that Firewire should be able to beat USB 2.0, I ran the test several times, and could not improve it. I tried with or without the power adapter, and even tried on my only other system with Firewire, and the results were always the same.
With a questionable set of results from the first benchmark, I moved on to running Simpli Software's HDTach RW 3.0.1.0 Quick Bench. This benchmark is similar to the Physical Disks benchmark from SiSoft, but we will look at a few more values. This time we want higher values for Burst Speed (in MB/s) and Avereage Read Speed (in MB/s), but lower values for Random Access Time (in ms) and CPU Utilization (in %).
From the results above you can see that this test confirms what the first one indicated... the MB124E is pretty slow! On the positive side, the random access time was a bit better, and the CPU utilization improved greatly when switching from USB 2.0 to Firewire!
I use other Firewire enclosures for a DVD burner and a 3.5" hard drive, and have never experienced poor performance. I am not sure what it is about the Icy Dock MB124E, but it could not get it to perform at anything better than half of what a cheap USB 2.0 enclosure could do!
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