| Enermax Laureate Drive Enclosures
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Testing:
All testing is performed on the following system:
• DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR Mother Board
• AMD Athlon 3000+ @ 300 x 8 (2400MHz)
• 2 X 6600GT graphics cards
• 2 x 512 TCCD G. Skill LE Ram
• 1 X 36GB WD Raptor
• 2 X 200GB Seagate's in RAID 1
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Once again we start with the 5.25" enclosure. Equipped with the NEC 3520A DVD burner, I attempted to burn a DVD with no luck. Actually the drive stopped responding completely after about five minutes, and wasn't even seen in Windows until I cycled power on the enclosure. For the next test, I tried to watch a DVD; again the drive stopped responding after a few minutes. So I tried a few other things like moving the jumper positions and different USB ports, again with no luck. I did eventually put the drive back into my computer and it works perfectly from there. So next I used an Asus DVD player and no problems with this setup at all.
Testing the 3.5" drive enclosure went much better than that of its larger sibling. Two hard drives were used, first Seagate's 200GB SATA ST3200826AS and Maxtor's 200GB DiamondMax 10 6L200R0. The Seagate was tested both internally and in the external enclosure for comparison.
As shown in the specifications, most companies rate their enclosures at 480Mbps max speed, which may be somewhat misleading because I have never actually seen an external drive capable of these speeds. Also note that 480Mbps is the same as 60MB/s or 60 x 8 = 480. A program called HD Tach is used to test hard drive speeds and reported the following for each situation. The first image shows the Seagate 200 GB SATA drive installed internally in order to find the maximum speed of the hard drive. Here we see an average speed of 59.7MB/s or 477.6Mbps.
The next test was done with the same drive while using the external enclosure. We see an average speed of 32.7MB/s or 261.6Mbps.
The last speed test is done using the Maxtor DiamondMax IDE drive. The numbers are just slightly lower than the SATA drive at 32.5MB/s or 260Mbps.
In addition to performance testing, I also tested the thermal performance of the hard drive enclosure. Using a temperature sensor from the Matrix Orbital MX610, I recorded the skin temperature of the drive while active (continuous data transfer). Readings were taken with the drive installed in the enclosure, as well as with the drive sitting in the open air, and the chart below summarizes the results as compared to the ambient temperature.
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