External USB 2.0 drive enclosure for $25

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External USB 2.0 drive enclosure for $25

Postby Corran » Sat Dec 20, 2003 8:34 pm

http://www.dealsonic.com/dealsonic/usb2 ... ID=1225267

I bought one of these back in early October for $55, aparently I should have waited. These things are great. If you can't fit any more harddrives into your pc or prefer editing on your laptop (provided they have an available USB 2.0 port) you can stick an internal Hard drive in this baby and go. You can also put your internal CD/DVD drive/burners in it if you want.
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Postby tokubetsu » Sun Jan 04, 2004 3:54 pm

that looks gd, i need more space for amv footage
=/
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Postby ErMaC » Tue Jan 06, 2004 4:43 pm

Corran, can you do my a favor, and run SiSoft Sandra and benchmark the drive you have in the enclosure? I've never heard of the AT2 chip that it's using, and I've been looking to buy some enclosures but I just want to know what kind of performance it'll get.
What drive do you have in it right now?
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Postby Corran » Wed Jan 07, 2004 11:17 am

When I get off of work today I'll do that. I have this enclosure, not the one I'm refering to in the post above so the test I run won't reflect the enclosure that the thread is about.

As for the harddrive in it I have a 120GB Maxtor harddrive. I will find the exact model and specs before I test it.
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Postby ErMaC » Wed Jan 07, 2004 12:16 pm

My friend did some research yesterday and found this thread about that particular enclosure, so I don't think I'll be buying it.
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Postby )v(ajin Koji » Wed Jan 07, 2004 2:13 pm

Hmmm, it looks quite good from the page Corran posted...I think i'll look for some that go to the U.K.
I'm bored and you're dumb. A match made in heaven.
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Last edited by )v(ajin Koji on Mon 21, 2011 9:36 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Postby TaranT » Wed Jan 07, 2004 5:38 pm

Corran Productions wrote:When I get off of work today I'll do that. I have this enclosure, not the one I'm refering to in the post above so the test I run won't reflect the enclosure that the thread is about.

As for the harddrive in it I have a 120GB Maxtor harddrive. I will find the exact model and specs before I test it.

I'm using the IEEE1394 version of this enclosure with an older Maxtor 40 GB drive. The Sandra file system benchmark shows an index of 23,598 kB/s (Win cache disabled) with 36 MB/s reads and 26 MB/s writes. This index is actually better than the index of my system drive - which is deceptive since the individual read/write numbers are significantly higher for the system drive (WD 80GB 7200 RPM w/ 8 MB cache). :? I don't know how Sandra reduces the indices.

The ADS kits are nice looking, but pricey ($70-$100). Also reliable; I have one of the older versions and two newer models. No problems with any of them.
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Postby Corran » Wed Jan 07, 2004 8:14 pm

The Test
<li>Hard drive: Maxtor 120GB Bare Ultra ATA/133 Fluid Bearing HDD</li>
<li>Enclosure: ADS USB 2.0 Drive Kit</li>

I first tested the the drive the way it was in the enclosure. Here are my results.
Image

As you can see the drive is about 1mB/s slower than the SiSoft Sandra definition of a Hi-speed USB drive in a typical system. Also shown in the box I made is SiSoft Sandra's guesstimate of what the drive would be like if internally connected. Since this drive is becoming more and more my primary editing drive I decided to swap it out with my internal 60 GB harddrive to get more speed out of it. I tested it inside the case and got a speed of 34631kB/s.

Misc system info that may matter:
<li>Soyo KT333 Dragon-lite motherboard</li>
<li>AMD Athlon XP 2600+</li>
<li>Belkin 2 port USB 2.0 PCI card</li>


TaranT wrote:
Corran Productions wrote:When I get off of work today I'll do that. I have this enclosure, not the one I'm refering to in the post above so the test I run won't reflect the enclosure that the thread is about.

As for the harddrive in it I have a 120GB Maxtor harddrive. I will find the exact model and specs before I test it.

I'm using the IEEE1394 version of this enclosure with an older Maxtor 40 GB drive. The Sandra file system benchmark shows an index of 23,598 kB/s (Win cache disabled) with 36 MB/s reads and 26 MB/s writes. This index is actually better than the index of my system drive - which is deceptive since the individual read/write numbers are significantly higher for the system drive (WD 80GB 7200 RPM w/ 8 MB cache). :? I don't know how Sandra reduces the indices.

The ADS kits are nice looking, but pricey ($70-$100). Also reliable; I have one of the older versions and two newer models. No problems with any of them.


After reading your post I was thinking 'WTF, those are some high speeds'. I am therefore somewhat confused. I was expecting the speed of my drive in the enclosure to be faster considering USB 2.0 is rated at 480mb/s which is aproximately 60mB/s. SiSoft Sandra is telling me however that the rating my drive got though is about average.
:?:
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Postby TaranT » Wed Jan 07, 2004 10:51 pm

I repeated the test by starting Sandra, selecting File System Benchmark, selecting the drive, and letting it run.

Here's the screengrab:

Image

Hard Drive: Maxtor 40 GB, model D740X-6L, 7200 rpm, 2 MB cache
Drive Kit: ADS Tech, Pyro 1394, L15-API-800

The system is an older Shuttle box: SS51G w/ SiS chipset.
I'm using one of the onboard 1394 ports.

Note the compares: there is a setting called "FireWire(1394)-ATA100 3.5..." My index is about the same as this preset.

I don't know why the Firewire compare is almost twice the Hi-Speed USB compare. Doesn't make sense. :?
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Postby TaranT » Thu Jan 08, 2004 4:22 am

For anyone who's interested...two comparison tests of USB2 vs Firewire for external hard drives:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/usb20vsfirewire/ (long load time for this page)
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/supergeek/jump/0,24331,3393574,00.html

From the first link:
Although the USB 2.0 is speedier than the FireWire, the latter beats it when used in high-speed storage devices. Probably, future products will unveil and use the full potential of the USB 2.0 bus. If we take only the storage devices sphere, the optimal solution would be a combo USB 2.0/FireWire -IDE bridge. In this case a user would get the maximum flexibility when choosing the ways of connection of data storage devices.
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