Use

One could consider the Baymaster a modern replacement of a floppy drive. It takes up the same amount of space, carries a similar price tag and utilizes the same method of operation. That said, in principle, it is a simple USB 2.0 dock packaged to fit into a 3.5 inch drive bay. Thus, we will take a look at its general usability along with performance. As USB 3.0 is faster than anything we can throw at it in terms of memory cards, I will focus on the performance of the hard drive bay instead.

Performance

HD Tach shows a straight line across the entire disk, which simply means that the hard drive used, is slowed down by the USB interface. As you can see, the Baymaster manages a very respectable 34.9 MB/s read speed, which puts it fairly high up there in the long list of enclosures we have reviewed over time.




To test the write performance, ATTO was used. Here the read speed is quite similar to that of HDTach, while the write performance maxxes out just above 30 MB/s. As we have just recently moved away from CPU Utilization and are focusing on comparing the write performance of drive, the below graph shows the selection since we started doing so. The Baymaster can certainly hold its own, but is not quite as fast as other enclosures.

SD Card Performance

Just to give you an idea about the performance when memory cards are used, the above is run of ATTO with a 16 GB Kingston Class 4 SDHC. As you can see, it works flawlessly and performs well. Moving files to and from a card like this should be painless and fairly quick.