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 Constellation ES.3 4TB 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 both single and RAID 0 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speeds), AIDA64 (Linear Read/Random Read), Crystal Disk Mark x64 (100MB/1000MB read/write speeds) and finally the quite outdated yet highly reliable ATTO 2.47 (Max Read/Max Write speeds).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. 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 15th 2016.

    * For this review we used 5 Seagate Constellation ES.3 4TB SATA III drives.