Akitio Taurus Mini Super-S LCM External RAID Storage Review

Benchmarking

Here we will look at if the Akitio Taurus Mini Super-S hinders HDD speed when compared to plugging the drive directly into a SATA port. We will be testing USB 2.0 (the slower connection) and eSATA (the faster connection) with both RAID 0 and RAID 1 setups. Our test HDDs will be 2x Seagate Momentus 640GB 2.5″ drives. Our test workstation will be as follows:

Intel i7-3820 CPU
ASRock Fatal1ty Professional X79 Motherboard
GSkill 4x 4gb RAM @ 1600 9-9-9-24
Corsair H100 CPU Cooler
Sapphire 7950 OC Video Card
Thermaltake Level 10 GT Snow Chassis
Windows 7 x64 Professional

Base Speed test

USB 2.0


Raid 0	Raid 1

No real surprises here since USB 2.0 maxes out ~30MB/s in transfer speed: we see minimal difference between RAID 0 and RAID 1. However it is to be noted that the spec sheet shows transfer speed of this device over USB 2.0 to max out at 60MB/s.

eSATA


Raid 0	Raid 1

Here is where things get interesting: in theory RAID 0 should give us around twice the transfer speed of a single drive. We see ~92MB/s on a single drive yet only 164MB/s. That leaves 30MB/s short of the theoretical 184MB/s RAID 0 should bring. For an external device that isn’t bad but for an internal RAID (Motherboard or RAID card) it leaves some speed to be desired.