| Ultra Products ULT31310 & Vantec NST-355U2 Drive Enclosures - Page 5 of 6 |
Testing:
Testing these drive enclosures head to head consisted of two main phases... synthetic benchmarks and real world data transfers. In the first portion of the testing, the enclosures were run through two fairly standard hard drive benchmarks; SiSoft Sandra 2005's File System Benchmark and HD Tach v3.0.1.0. All tests were conducted on a freshly formatted Western Digital 200GB ATA-100 hard drive, and the system was rebooted between every test. An Intel Pentium 4 2.6C based system with 1GB of PC3200 DDR and an Intel 865PE motherboard was used for connecting both enclosures via onboard USB 2.0 headers, as well as testing the Ultra Products drive via Firewire.
The results charted below are taken from SiSoft Sandra 2005's File System Benchmark, and show that both enclosures allow this hard drive to perform well. This benchmark provides several results, and a few were selected to represent the performance of each enclosure. As can be seen, the data transfer rates over USB 2.0 were quite comparable, although the Ultra Products device did hold a 2 MB/s edge in both buffered reading and the synthetic drive index (higher numbers are better). A system with Firewire available for use will see a decent increase in performance, as the same drive was able to transfer data at a much higher rate.
The other feature of the chart above shows the average access time, where either USB 2.0 based connection took 9.0 milliseconds, and the Ultra Products drive connected via Firewire lagged behind at 13.0 milliseconds (lower is better).
HD Tach provides information similar to what SiSoft Sandra provides, but it is a good second opinion on the performance of these enclosures. The "Long Benchmark" option was selected in HD Tach v3.0.1.0, and the results of each test are presented below.
It can be seen that Firewire gives the performance a significant boost, and either drive connected via USB 2.0 can be expected to perform about the same. Once again, the Ultra Products enclosure did allow the drive to perform slightly better, so top honors in this portion of the review have to go to that product.
HD Tach also provides information regarding CPU utilization, and it can be seen that the Firewire chipset requires far less CPU power than USB 2.0, which could be important for heavily loaded systems.
The real world testing involved a total of four phases. The first two phases revolved around the transfer of large files, which was accomplished by writing and then reading a folder of DivX movies to the drive while in the two enclosures. The folder contained 16 files with a total size of 10.9 GB. The final two phases revolved around the transfer of smaller files, which was accomplished by writing and then reading a total of 44 folders of MP3 files to the drive while in the two enclosures. The folders contained 336 files with a total size of 1.38 GB.
The transfers were timed, and then the transfer rate was calculated and converted to MB/s. The bold figures below represent all of the transfer rates in MB/s (higher is better), and all of the transfer times are presented in units of seconds just to the left of the transfer rates (lower is better).
The results above show that in real world operation, the two enclosures provide quite similar results. The only portion of testing that stands out is with the reading transfer rate of small files, where the Vantec NexStar 2 held a noticeable edge.
Overall, the testing of both devices went well, and neither can be considered an inferior product. Although they both perform well, the Ultra Products enclosure did do slightly better in most tests, and could be considered the winner of the performance match up.
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