Performance

The Akasa integral ESATA can be used with USB 2.0 and as the name mentions - ESATA. The great advantage of ESATA is performance, as you can expect the same speed as a hard drive installed inside your computer. The ESATA cable uses a slightly different connector than the kind used on modern mainboards. While some manufacturers offer ESATA connectors on the back of some boards, you can always buy a PCI backplane which converts the internal SATA connectors to the external kind, giving you the ESATA feature. The Akasa integral can be used with an IDE or SATA drive when connected via USB. ESATA connectivity is only given for SATA drives. I connected an IDE drive, flipped the switch in the back of the case and connected the SATA cable, but the drive never spun up as usual once the power was turned on. The enclosure will not get damaged if you forget to flip the switch or use an IDE drive with SATA.

USB 2.0

IDE Interface
A Samsung T133 300GB 8MB cache 7200 RPM was used for our performance tests.






The Akasa integral ESATA shines with a good performance of over 30MB/s. As you can see the CPU utilization is great at only 8%. The CoolerMaster may be 10% faster, but utilizes the CPU twice as much as well.


The ATTO benchmark shows us similar read and write speeds. This is great. Most enclosures show much lower read than write speeds in the ATTO benchmark.

SATA Interface
A Samsung 80GB SATA drive was used for our performance tests.




There is no performance difference when using a SATA drive. So you have complete choice as to what drive to use, without having to fear less performance. Let's keep the SATA drives performance of 51MB/s in mind.


The ATTO results are just as good with the SATA drive as with the IDE part.

ESATA

The ESATA performance is 50.9MB/s. Remember the drive performance itself - 51MB/s. There is no noticeable difference in performance when the ESATA connection is used. This was to be expected.