HornetTek Defender Hard Drive Enclosure

Benchmarks

To test the enclosure I ran some basic benchmarks to get an idea of transfer speed while in the enclosure and then compared the results to the drive plugged in internally through SATA.

The drive used in the tests was a Seagate Momentus 5400rpm 160GB drive.

HD Tune

HD Tune is an excellent program that gives a quick, easy-to-understand readout of minimum, maximum, and average transfer speeds as well as access time and CPU usage.

On the left we have the HornetTek Defender results and on the right is the SATA results. As you can see, the Defender held a fairly constant 28MB/s or so while the SATA connection started high at around 45MB/s but steadily dropped down to 22MB/s by the end of the test. Access times changed very little from SATA to USB and CPU usage was increased by about 2%.

These results are pretty much expected as the drive is going to be held back moderately in this case or even severely with a faster drive due to the limitations of USB 2.0.

SiSoftware Sandra

Sandra is an excellent storage testing utility that is capable of testing a greater range of storage mediums than HD Tune and gives more detailed information.

Once again on the left is the USB results in green and on the right the SATA results. In the Defender benchmark you can see the SATA and USB results side by side to get an idea of the overall difference. This test gave similar results to HD Tune with the enclosure averaging about 28MB/s and the SATA averaging 35MB/s. The access times again were very close.

Real-World File Transfer

The final benchmark is one that may be a little more useful for the average consumer. I transferred a portion of my music collection from my PC the the drive and took note of a rough average transfer speed. The point of this test is to reflect real-world usage where you might just use the drive to carry a large number of small files such as music, pictures, etc.

On the left is the USB connected Defender and on the right is the SATA connection. The Defender held a constant 20MB/s for the most part while the SATA connection tended to start very high and drop quickly over time. For the SATA I just chose a spot that I felt would reflect its average the best which tended to be between 80 and 45 MB/s.

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