Performance

In regards to performance, this enclosure was thoroughly tested using its eSATA interface only.  After all, those who spend the extra dollars on this particular model will likely be taking advantage of the higher performance it truly does offer.  Now, it is important to note that the results you will achieve heavily depend on your systems hardware and configuration.  I have personally used a number of eSATA storage devices over the past year, some consisting of multi-drive RAID arrays.  What I found is that eSATA solutions are clearly not as reliable as a drive connected directly to your PC via its internal SATA interface.  You will likely encounter a number of issues and it comes down to trail and error before you can identify and somewhat "tweak" this kind of setup where it will not only perform well, but maintain a high level of reliability.  With that said, this enclosure was tested on my main HTPC system that has not only been tweaked for maximum eSATA performance, but runs a reliable controller card based around the Sil3132 chipset.

To measure its performance, a number of tools were used, including Sisoftware's SANDRA 2009, HD Tune and the excellent DiskBench utility.  All results are detailed below...

SANDRA 2009 Results

**click to enlarge**

In the Physical Disks benchmark, the drive performed quite well in regards to its overall Drive Index.  The results with this popular benchmark utility showed transfer speeds just above 88MB/s.  The access time was surprisingly higher at 14ms. 

HD Tune Results

The next set of tests I like to perform are with HD Tune. For those unfamiliar with this small yet practical utility, it is a tool primarily designed to measure hard disk performance. What's nice about this tool is that it is similar to Nero's CD-DVD Speed in the sense that it will provide you with a clear look at how the disk "behaves" during the entire testing process. However, I have found that it tends to behave oddly with a select few storage devices but I still find it a much better option over a number of other benchmarking utilities out there.

**click to enlarge**

Looking at the results, we see that the transfer rates remain consistent at roughly 88MB/s when compared to SANDRA.  The average transfer speed was still well above 80MB/s.  In addition, HD Tune reported an Access Time of 13.8 and CPU usage rate of only 5.8%.

Actual Performance Results

As I like to do with all storage products, I deviate from synthetic benchmarks and like to provide actual performance results so that most will have a much better idea at what you can actually expect in terms of overall transfer speeds. These tests are always done with the excellent DiskBench Utility. Once again, for those who are unfamiliar with this application, DiskBench is a utility designed to measure real life transfer rates. Unlike synthetic benchmark utilities, this application will allow you to create an image file of a user specified size and allow you to transfer it to and from the device you are testing in order to capture real-time read/write transfer rates and times. Other than running these tests on your own, which can take a considerable amount of extra time, it is simply the most accurate tool to capture reliable read/write times of any storage product.

Looking at the results above, we finally conclude that with the right drive and system setup, you can expect average transfer rates between 75-90MB/s.  Note though that its write performance is substantially higher in comparison and this was actually apparent when transferring a number of large files to the drive itself. 

Finally, we have a look at the overall transfer times using the same test files consisting sizes ranging from 500MB to 4GB.  In this higher-end HTPC, you can clearly see that the enclosure performed very well, all of which remained just under a full minute.  In fact, out of a number of eSATA products I have used in the past, this is by far the speediest of the bunch.

Overall, the results clearly show the benefits of using an eSATA enclosure over other external storage solutions, including Firewire 800.  You simply can't compare USB and Firewire options in regards to overall speed.  However, as with all eSATA products I have used, reliability is a whole other story.  Most users are likely to encounter a number of issues unless they have the knowledge and take the time to tweak their system the best they can to eliminate a majority of them.  Once again, eSATA solutions are not to be compared to standard SATA drive setups and this kind of connectivity will present a number of reliability issues if you don't take the time to configure them properly.

Next: Conclusions