TEST BED

TESTING METHODOLOGY

   Complicating things is not really our way so once again our testing procedure will be almost identical to the one we use with 2.5" external drives and 2.5"/3.5" external docking stations. Naturally we will also be comparing the product at hand with a wide range of 3.5" external drives and standalone 3.5" enclosures (all of which were benched using the Constellation ES.2 SATA III 3TB hard disk drive). Our standard selection of benchmark suites is used here as well for both single and RAID 0 testing and includes all the latest and stable versions of HD Tach RW (Long Bench 32mb Zones), HD Tune Pro (read/write -when possible- speeds), Sisoftware Sandra Pro (Read/Write -also when possible- speeds), AIDA64 (Linear Read/Random Read), Crystal Disk Mark x64 (100MB/1000MB read/write speeds) and finally the quite outdated yet still highly reliable ATTO 2.47 (Max Read/Max Write speeds). Temps as usual were recorded using the latest version of Hard Disk Sentinel along with the sensors provided by AIDA64. Every test was repeated for a total of 6 times and after that the average (not peak) performance numbers were recorded into our graphs. As always every test was performed in a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows 7 Service Pack 1 with every update installed up to September 12th 2013.