Performance

To test the performance two Seagate Momentus 7200.1 80GB drives were used. One features SATA connectivity, while the other is of the IDE variety. Most people may not use a 7200RPM drive in such an enclosure, simply because there is a price premium on such drives and they are not available in large capacities. We use these to measure the maximum performance such an enclosure is capable of, as 5400RPM or 4200RPM drives would become the bottleneck instead of the enclosure itself..

USB 2.0 Performance

Actual IDE and SATA drive performace

Both drives where connected to a normal PC and benchmarked. The above results show that both drives are fast enough, but may bottleneck the enclosure on the outer edge of the platters. It was to be expected, that 2.5 inch drives are not as fast as traditional 3.5 inch variants used in desktop PCs.

IDE and SATA within the Akasa P2NES enclosure

Benchmarking the two equal drives within the P2NES yields slightly different results. The Seagate SATA drive seems to perform better both in performance and when CPU utilization is concerned. Note the 0% CPU utilization, which is a first in hard drive enclosures. Upon repeated testing in such a configuration the result varied between 0% and 1%, thus we chose the latter in the bar graph below. An IDE drive will tax the CPU with 4% - still a very low score. The gap in read performance is around 4MB/s, or just over 10% and should make a noticable difference when copying large files.




The ATTO benchmark results yield the same difference in read speed, but also show that the write performance is identical, no matter what drive is used.

SATA - eSATA

eSATA performance is just as you would expect from such a device. You will not find a noticable drop in performance as the SATA connection of the Seagate Momentus is simply routed to the back of the enclosure. The only drawback is the additional two port USB cable needed to power the P2NES when eSATA is used.


ATTO also yields the expected results in such a configuration.