Thermaltake BlacX Duet HDD Docking Station

We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: AVADirect, GIGABYTE, Cooler Master, LSI and Noctua.

You can read more about TweakTown's Storage Product Testing Workstation and the procedures followed to test products in this article.

With the current USB 3.0 products on the market we are able to achieve up to 200MB/s reads and writes. Most motherboards now have dedicated eSATA ports on their rear I/O plate. These are usually added to a system by a JMicron controller, the kings of mediocrity. By adding a low cost SATA to eSATA bracket you can get true SATA II performance out of your eSATA device. We will have a larger article on this in the coming weeks, so come back to learn all about external data.

For testing today we will stick with the motherboard's onboard eSATA port that maxes out at around 135MB/s.

For testing we will use the Crucial RealSSD C300, the world's fastest 256GB SSD. Crucial has graced us with several of these drives for use in all of our storage product reviews. You can learn more about the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB SSD here.

ATTO Baseline Performance

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.34

ATTO is used by many disk manufacturers to determine the read and write speeds that will be presented to customers.

Using ATTO we see that JMicron controller limiting the available bandwidth, but we are still pushing data faster than what any desktop platter drive is able to move. The official scoring came to 135MB/s read speed and 121MB/s write speed.