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.
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.
