Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed that you are likely to experience with these enclosures.

USB 2.0


As we suspected, there was little to no difference between the two enclosures when USB was used. These minor variations can be consider statistical aberrations and are too small to be considered different.


FIREWIRE


Here you can see the real benefits of with the use of the Firewire connections. Not only is the Firewire 400 faster than the USB 2.0 connection we saw before but the Firewire 800 results were blazingly fast with a peak of 86.8MB/s in RAID 0 Stripe mode.


Random Access Time

Once again, HDTach was used for the benchmark. This benchmark tests how quickly different areas of the drive’s memory can be accessed. A low number means that the drive space can be accessed quickly while a high number means that more time is taken trying to access different parts of the drive.

USB 2.0


Once again there was no difference between the two enclosures when USB was used. Overall, such a small increase in random access times is to be expected as a second controller is now involved in data communications.


FIREWIRE


Unsurprisingly the slower 1394a connection was totally outclassed by the larger potential bandwidth of the newer 1394b. As you can also see FireWire had faster read speeds regardless of mode used, however the difference between FireWire and USB was fairly small and the cheaper model certainly held up its end in the random access tests.