Software

Since Sharkoon included a CD with drivers, I had to try it out. It sports a simple menu for installing the right drivers on older operating systems. No drivers for Windows XP are needed.

Performance

USB 2.0

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


The USB interface is quite constant up to around 140GB on this hard drive with around 32MB/s. After that the transfer rate becomes erratic and stays around the 30MB/s line.


This image shows how the hard drive behaves when hooked up directly to the IDE channel (blue) compared to the USB speed achieved (red). As you can see, there is a tiny dip toward the end when "connected to USB" is limited by the slow outer read speed of the Samsung drive. However, this difference is not nearly as large as the Cooler Master X-Craft we reviewed here, as it is not quite as fast.


The ATTO Disk Benchmark gives us the same results as HD Tach. The Swift-Case Combo maxes out at just around 33MB/s.

Firewire

The actual performance with Firewire is around 5MB/s faster than USB 2.0. The CPU utilization went down from 11% to 0%. This is better than the Cooler Master X-Craft.


The ATTO scores show a large jump in read speed, while the write speed is slower than when connected via USB.