Testing:
To test the transfer rate of the hard drive and the enclosure, the Vantec EZ Swap EX 2.5 Inch Hard Drive Enclosure was connected to a system with the following equipment in order to monitor the transfer rate as reported by HD Tach 3.0.4.0.
» AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ processor
» Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe
» 2GB (2x1024) OCZ DDR2 8500 SLI RAM
» eVGA 8800GTS 640MB
» Tagan TurboJet 1100W Power Supply
» 2x 80GB Hitachi Deskstar 3Gbps hard drive
» 1x 120GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» 1x 400GB Western Digital 7200 SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» 1x 80GB Seagate 2.5" 5400.3 SATA 1.5Gbps hard drive
» Memorex DVD/CDRW
The first thing I wanted to do was to get a good base line reading of what the hard drive is capable of. In order to do this, I connected the Seagate 2.5" SATA drive directly to my motherboard. With a random access time of 15.5ms, average read time of 36.8MB/s, and a burst speed of 124.5MB/s, this is not a terrible drive, especially considering the 5400 RPM and 1.5Gbps interface.
Next, I ran the benchmark after I installed the drive into the enclosure, and inserted it into the 3.5" drive bay chassis. I was not able to notice any difference in performance, and HD Tach confirmed this. The random access time was 15.4ms, average read time was 36.8MB/s, and a burst speed was 123.3MB/s. The burst speed barely dropped, and will not be noticable in any real world situations.
Using the USB 2.0 connection, I expected the drive to perform much slower than the internal SATA connection due to the reduced capabilities of the USB 2.0 bus and not the enclosure. The random access time was 16.0ms, average read time was 32.7MB/s, and a burst speed was 36.2MB/s. While the burst speed is nowhere close to what was achieved when connected via SATA, the random access time and average read speed were both pretty close.
Since the enclosure has a standard SATA connection, I decided to run an additional test using an external SATA port (not eSATA). This is not a common feature, as most external SATA connections are eSATA. The results connecting it to an external SATA data port and a USB power connection matched what I received when connected directly to the motherboard, and using the internal chassis. Random access time was 15.7ms, average read speed was 36.8MB/s, and the burst speed was 123.8MB/s.
|
|
