X-bit labs

Nine External Enclosures for 2.5” Hard Disk Drives Roundup (page 11)

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 01/31/2006 | 02:18 PM ]

Testbed and Methods

Of course, we can’t check the operating characteristics of a HDD enclosure without putting a hard drive into it. So we took one of the fastest drives of today, Seagate Momentus 7200.1 (ST910021A). This 7200rpm drive has a storage capacity of 100GB and an 8MB cache buffer. Its higher performance comes largely due to its higher spindle rotation speed. Using this drive will help us to see the real characteristics of the enclosures better since the HDD won’t play a bottleneck in the system.

We tested the assembled external hard disk drives with WinBench 99 2.0 and FC-Test 1.0.

The testbed was configured as follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro II mainboard
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz
• IBM DTLA-307015 hard disk drive, 15GB
• RADEON 7000 32MB graphics card
• 256MB DDR SDRAM
• Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4

The containers were attached to a USB 2.0 port of the i865 chipset’s South Bridge (ICH5). The Sarotech Cutie DX FHD-254UF2 was also tested on an IEEE1394a controller based on the VIA VT6307 chip.