Performance Testing

Read Bandwidth

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


With read speeds it appears the MobileSTOR’s burst performance is more or less handicapped by either the motherboard’s SATA controller or the SIL 5744 controller. Either way it does not really matter as what is really important is the average read speeds. In this area the eSATA connected MobileSTOR simply walks away from the rest of the competition. Even in JBOD performance it is better than the rest. However, as is becoming a reoccurring theme, the USB results are less than one would like to see, they are not abysmal but by the same token you certainly wouldn’t purchase this unit based of those numbers either.


Random Access Time

Once again, HDTach was used for this 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.


When it comes to random access times the MobileSTOR is very good to good with eSATA but only mediocre to sub optimal over USB. The latencies when using USB are large enough as to be noticeable. It is becoming very obvious the SIL’s forte is not USB performance; this is OK as its main job is eSATA which performs very well.


SIS Sandra

This test was run with the removable storage benchmark in Sandra XII Standard. All of the scores are calculated in operations per second and have been averaged out from the scores of 4 test runs.


As we saw with the previous tests, the MobileSTOR is only a mediocre performer when in USB configuration. Oddly enough, only while in RAID 0 is the MobileSTOR a better SiS performer than the single drive Eagle Consus-M.