Testing:
With the drive installed and ready to go, I put it through the paces of two common file system benchmarks, SiSoft Sandra Max3!’s file system benchmark and Simpli Software’s HD Tach 2.70. The NetDisk was tested in both USB 2.0 mode and NDAS mode for each benchmark, and compared to other drives installed in this system. The system in question contains (2) 40 GB Maxtor 6E040L0 drives in a ATA-100 RAID 0 array, (1) 40 GB Maxtor 6E040L0 drive on an ATA-133 IDE channel, and a 10 GB Toshiba 2.5” drive in a USB 2.0 enclosure.
Test system specifications:
• AMD Athlon XP2800+ Barton Processor
• Shuttle AN35N Ultra nForce2 Ultra 400 Motherboard
• (1) Maxtor 40GB Hard Drive
• (2) Maxtor 40GB Hard Drives in RAID 0
• Lite-On CD-RW Drive
• Artec DVD Drive
• Linksys EtherFast Desktop 5-Port 10/100 Switch
The file system benchmark module of SiSoft Sandra Max3! provides numerous pieces of information regarding the read and write speeds of the hard drive, as well as access time, and the screen captures below show a summary of the results, in kB/s, as plotted against some default results provided with the benchmark. As seen below, the USB 2.0 connection provides much greater speed than the Ethernet connection, which should be no real surprise with a network connection supporting a maximum speed of 100 MB/s and USB 2.0 supporting a maximum speed of 480 MB/s.
NDAS Mode Results
USB 2.0 Mode Results
The graph below plots the SiSoft Sandra file system benchmarks from the two NetDisk modes with the other drives in this system. Obviously the NetDisk can’t compete for the speed crown with an internal ATA-133 or RAID 0 setup, but compared to another USB 2.0 device it does quite well.
HD Tach is another benchmark used to analyze the performance of storage devices. According to the Simpli Software site “HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays... HD Tach measures the sequential read speed (at various points on the device), the random access speed, interface burst speed and CPU utilization of the drive. The registered version adds sequential write testing.”
The graphics below are screen captures of the HD Tach results, with the NetDisk in NDAS mode shown on the left and in USB 2.0 mode shown on the right. Unsurprisingly, and as seen in SiSoft Sandra’s file system benchmark, the NetDisk performed better connected to the USB 2.0 port.
 
As another point of reference, the graph below shows the average read speeds as reported by HD Tach for all physical drives installed in the system in question. The only surprise here is to see that the 2.5” Toshiba drive connected via USB 2.0 edges out the NetDisk in USB 2.0 mode, despite getting outscored in the SiSoft benchmark.
Please read on to page 3 for the conclusion on the Ximeta NetDisk... Next.
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