Testing and Usage
I’m sure most of you are skipping right to here for the test results so here they are. We all know that USB 3.0 has a potentially faster transfer speed cap over USB 2.0 but I wanted to see if the enclosure holds up to that.
Test System Specs:
Dell XPS 17 L702X
Windows 7 Pro 64-Bit
Intel i7-2720QM
8GB RAM
2x Identical Samsung 750GB/7200 RPM SATA II HDDs
RAID 0 is all about performance and not so much about data safety. In these tests you will see about a 328% increase in read speed with USB 3.0 vs USB 2.0. Now with write speed you will see roughly 265% speed increase.
RAID 1 is all about sacrificing performance for data safety. What that being said, you still see a 287% increase in speed when using USB 3.0 vs USB 2.0 and a 307% increase for write speeds.
Here is where we start running into issues. I spent several hours troubleshooting my laptop because I could not get both drives to function in the No RAID configuration and thought my laptop was the problem. The only way I could get the No RAID configuration to work was to only have an HDD in slot 1. So if you have 2 HDDs in or only one in Slot 2, the No RAID configuration will not work properly. I am not sure if it is only a problem with the sample that we received or if it is all of them.
When using the No RAID configuration you should see two separate drives show up in My Computer. The only reason I can see anyone using this option is if you have 2 different drive sizes and can’t use one of the other RAID configurations. In testing again, USB 3.0 proved to to have faster transfer speeds than USB 2.0 by 283% when reading data and 330% when writing data.
Please note that I am using SATA II drives for all tests and not SATA III drives. With SATA III drives, you will see much greater speeds.(Roughly 100-150% improvement in read/write speed)