Testbed and Methods
We installed Hitachi HDS722525VLAT80 (with a PATA interface) and Hitachi HDS722525VLSA80 (with a SATA interface) hard drives into the enclosures to test them. These internal drives are fast enough to fully utilize the bandwidth of USB 2.0 and FireWire interfaces and have comparable performance.
We compared the enclosures by the speed of the drives installed in them. We installed only the Hitachi HDS722525VLSA80 into the AgeStar CFB3A1 enclosure.
We tested the enclosures with the following benchmarks:
- WinBench 99 2.0
- FC-Test 1.0
Testbed configuration:
- Albatron PX865PE Pro II mainboard
- Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU
- IBM DTLA-307015 Hard Disk drive, 15GB
- Radeon 7000 32MB graphics card
- 256MB DDR SDRAM
- Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2
The enclosures were connected to a mainboard?s USB 2.0 port, to a FireWire interface of a VIA VT6307-based controller, and to a Promise controller.
Most of the enclosures were tested with all the interfaces they support. So, we are going to talk not about nine enclosures, but about thirteen external Hard Disk drives.