Now that we’ve taken everything apart and installed a drive, let’s see what kind of performance we can expect with this Rosewill product. To accomplish this task I will use a couple of standard benchmarking utilities then do a times data transfer test. This will give us numbers that are commonly used for comparison purposes and also solid times that will let us know how this thing will perform in a real-world scenario.
The utilities on tap for this test will be the latest incarnation of SiSoft Sandra (vXI) and HD Tach from Simpli Software. Both are common benchmarks that anyone can use on their own system for comparison, so you can see how this device handles data transfers against your own rig. The data transfer test will consist of copying the demo file for Company of Heroes from the host system to the external drive, then back again. This file weighs in at a hefty 1.75GB so should give us a good idea of how the device handles downloads. After all, odds are good that you are looking at this type of device for extra data storage, so we want to make sure it is up to the task.
The test system will consist of:
Gigabyte 965P-DS4 motherboard (Supplied by Gigabyte) Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor 2x 1024MB Corsair XMS2-8500-C5 memory (Supplied by Corsair) GeCube X1900XTX graphics (Supplied by GeCube) Sapphire X1900XT graphics (Supplied by Sapphire) Western Digital 250GB SATA hard drive Sony 52x CD-ROM optical drive Samsung 16x DVD-R optical drive
SiSoft Sandra (System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is a synthetic Windows benchmark that features different tests used to evaluate different PC subsystems.
The top screenshot shows the results of the drive being hooked directly to the host system. The second is connected via e.SATA and the bottom shows USB connectivity.
While we expected to see slower speeds with the USB connection, the near identical performance through the e.SATA was a bit of a surprise. A certain amount of overhead is common in this type of device and there appears to be none with the PC bracket that came with the packaging. This shows that a direct connection is being used and you will lose very little performance from using your SATA device as an external unit, assuming of course that your system natively supports SATA to begin with.
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