Performance

To test the USB 2.0 performance of the Rosewill R2-Raid, it will be connected to a Compaq Presario laptop with an Intel ICH7 chipset, with Windows XP for the operating system. HDTach 3.0.4.0 was used to test each raid setting, and each test was performed three times with the results averaged.


When configured in a RAID 0 array, the read performance is pegged at 30.8 MB per second. Raid 1 performance is slightly lower, which is typical for these two types of RAID. However, the hard drive's performance is very limited by the USB connection. During both tests, CPU utilization was about 14%.

To test the performance of the R2-Raid with the RC-218 controller card, a different computer was used. The test rig used for these tests is as follows:

Since eSATA basically allows the drive to perform the same as an internal SATA, the read speeds should greatly improve over USB. The images above prove that, with RAID 0 read speeds reaching over 108 MB per second, while RAID 1 speeds are just below 70 MB/s. CPU utilization drops for both array types to only one or two percent.



Here, the same information above is presented in an easy to read and to compare set of graphs.