Performance

We used a Samsung SP1604N 160GB 7200 RPM IDE harddisk for our performance tests.


The pictures show the transfer rate from beginning of the disk (left), to end of the disk (right). This picture displays the USB transfer rate. As you can see the USB interface limits the rate to about 32 MB/s (=256 MBit/s).


This picture shows the transfer rate when directly connected to the IDE controller. Here you can see that the HDD was never the bottleneck when used with USB.

As was to be expected, the USB interface is the limiting factor here. For easier comparison, the orange line marks the average transfer rate of the HDD via USB interface. Near the end of the HDD the USB transfer rate almost reaches the HDD transfer speed.


The results in ATTO are very similar to what we saw in HDTach. The last benchmark is the Ethernet performance for the SAMBA protocol. The Samba share was mounted to the testing machine and the tests were performed on that drive letter. Please note that ATTO uses a different scaling for the bars in each graph.

The Ethernet performance of a little more than 3 Megabytes per second is quite slow. Especially if you take the good USB speeds into consideration.


To verify the Ethernet results we transferred a 150 MB ISO file over the network. The results were a bit better here, but still quite low with 3.8 MB/s. It seems that the networking chip can not deliver faster speeds - and I was hoping for a GigE version soon...

We tried booting from the USB HDD and it worked fine. All you need is a BIOS which supports boot from USB device. Booting from LAN is not supported.