Setup and testing
Benchmarking external drives such as this is something of a mixed bag. We ultimately have to ask whether speed is the main consideration when purchasing an external drive enclosure. We certainly want our files to transfer this side of the weekend, but provided transfer rates are at least competent and useable, are not other features more important when making a purchase? Nevertheless, we need to see how well these two products perform.
Test system
| Processor | AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Winchester) @ 2.55GHz |
| Motherboard | ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe, BIOS 1013 |
| Memory | 2x512MiB Corsair XMS3200XL |
| HyperTransport clock | 255MHz x 4 |
| Memory timings | 2.5-2-2-5 2T @ 425MHz |
| Graphics Card | XFX GeForce 6800 GT 256MB |
| Operating System | Windows XP Pro SP2 |
| Testing Hard drives | 3.5" - Maxtor Y200P0 200GB 2.5" - 40GB Hitachi Travelstar |
Testing software: HD Tach RW 3.0.1.
Test results
We'll start with the 3.5" enclosure. We've included results for a 3.5" Icy Box as well, for comparison. Please note that the Icy Box results are not those from the original Icy Box review we did. The same Maxtor Y200P0 200GB hard drive was used in both enclosures.
The Ultra enclosure demonstrates more consistent sustained transfer rates through its USB interface, barring a couple of significant blips when writing towards the end of the disk. There are numerous firmware versions for the Prolific chip out there, and aside from implementation differences and power delivery issues, this is the only factor which might influence the results. Nonetheless, both enclosures read and write at speeds you'd expect, but the Ultra is more reliable in this test.
Here, we're in danger of having the most exciting benchmark to grace the HEXUS.labs... ever. Both enclosures are equally consistent. Read performance over Firewire is ever so slightly better. Writing isn't as nippy as over USB 2.0.
These benchmarks demonstrate the 3.5" Portable Disk Enclosure as a capable product that will deliver the expected level of performance from such a solution. On now to the 2.5" model.
As HD Tach gets towards the outer edge of the disk, performance starts to tail off. Clearly the IDE to USB2.0 bridge isn't doing much to limit performance, able to transfer data quicker than the disk can. Again, performance is good. No records are going to broken here today, but backups and large file transfers won't have you waiting around forever.
