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 external docking stations. However, since we are talking about an multi-bay 3.5" external enclosures this time over we will be using one or more (depends on the mode) Seagate IronWolf 12TB SATA III hard disk drives since mechanical drives are obviously what people will use more with such devices (besides in quad+ enclosures these should pretty much max out the performance of the onboard controller). Our standard selection of benchmark suites is used here as well for single, RAID 0 and RAID 1 testing including the famous 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speeds), AIDA64 (Linear Read/Random Read), Crystal Disk Mark x64 (100MB/1000MB read/write speeds) and finally the quite outdated yet highly reliable ATTO 2.47 (Max Read/Max Write speeds).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 while noise levels were recorded using our HD600 dBA meter placed just 10-15cm above each unit. 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 10 Pro with every update installed up to the moment of this review.

* Since March 2017 we also started recording noise levels.
* Since May 2020 we started using IronWolf 12TB drives.