Akasa Integral External Enclosures

Performance

We tested the performance of the enclosures by installing a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB IDE drive into each of them and attaching them to a Sony Vaio FE21B notebook. For the LAN test, we attached the LAN cable to a Cisco 857W wireless router and tested the drive through the notebook’s 802.11g (54Mbps) wireless connection. We did not test a SATA drive in the Integral eSATA enclosure since the eSATA protocol does not reduce the maximum speed a SATA port can achieve, meaning that the performance will depend on the capabilities of the drive and motherboard chipset alone. On the other hand, USB connections are limited by the enclosures and LAN connections can only achieve the maximum speed that the network allows up to a theoretical 100Mbps.

eSATA - Sandra (Removable Storage)

eSATA - Sandra (File Systems)

Fusion - Sandra (Removable Storage)

Fusion - Sandra (File Systems)

LAN - Sandra (Removable Storage)

LAN - Sandra (File Systems)

UTP LAN - Sandra (File Systems)

WiFi LAN - Sandra (File Systems)

When using the USB 2.0 connection, the Integral LAN and eSATA enclosures allow the drive to produce a great deal of its potential. They perform better than most other high speed USB 2.0 drives we have seen to date, allowing the drive to reach a 30MB/s maximum read speed. The Integral Fusion is somewhat slower, probably due to the different chipset used in it, limiting the drive to 20MB/s maximum read and write speed. 20MB/s from a USB drive is still not bad at all, but it is 30% lower than the speed of the other 2 enclosures. Testing the Integral LAN through our WiFi connection gave us worse results though, with the speed of the drive barely exceeding 1.5MB/s, despite the maximum theoretical speed of 6.75MB/s a 802.11g connection can achieve. Testing the drive from a PC directly connected to the router via a UTP cable gave us much better results (about 4 times higher). It would seem that wireless connections are not going to be very fast and certainly not ideal for large file transfers.