TEST BED

TESTING METHODOLOGY

     Testing hot-swap cages is not really needed since they just act as a bridge between your SATA or SAS controller it doesn't however harm to be 100% thorough. So in this kind of reviews we use a HGST Travelstar 5k1500 1.5TB SATA III HDD with our typical benchmarking suites in an effort to bring you the most accurate results across the board. Now the only reason why we say effort is because real-world usage is not always on par with what results one gets by running several benchmarks on a drive and that's mainly because there are many variables at work from ambient temperatures to hardware configurations and even firmware versions.

   Once again the benchmarking applications we use are the AIDA64 suite (former Everest Pro), HD Tune Professional, HD Tach RW, ATTO, Sisoftware Sandra Pro, PCMark 7 and the well-known Crystal Disk Mark 64bit. These benchmarking tools are the best in what they do and as you will also see later on their results more or less agree. Each test is performed a total of 6 times and then the average is recorded into the charts. Temperatures are recorded using Hard Disk Sentinel and after 45 minutes of continuous testing in a 23 degrees Celsius temperature controlled room. Finally with actively cooled solutions we also use an ExTech HD600 dBA meter next to each drive cage (5-10cm away) in order to accurately record their noise levels, although it's very possible that the fans in your system will mask noise coming from the cage. The operating system as usual is a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Service Pack 1 with every update installed up until the 22nd of November 2013.