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A.C. Ryan AluBox LAN |
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USB 2.0
The A.C. Ryan AluBox LAN is an IDE based enclosure, but is also available for SATA drives. CaseKing has a complete lineup of 14 AluBox enclosures, so there is bound to be something to fit your needs. We tested the AluBox LAN with a Samsung T133 300GB 7200RPM drive.
The enclosure delivers an excellent 33.5MB/s on the USB 2.0 connectivity, actually beating the long time number one in our benchmarks, the Cooler Master X-Craft. The CPU utilization of 9% are great as well, especially as this is the X-Craft's shortcoming with 15%.
Atto confirms the read speeds and also also shows what good write speed this enclosure is capable of.
LAN
The ethernet connection was tested with the use of a switch, as this is the usual connection method in a network.
The maximum speed of 10.1 MB/s is quite solid, considering a 100 MBit network can theoretically transfer up to 11.0 MB/s. This result was achieved with a single computer accessing the drive and you will see a large drop in performance if two or more users require simultaneous access to the AluBox LAN.
The ATTO benchmark actually results in a slightly smaller read, but higher write speed, with 9.4 MB/s when reading and 10.3 MB/s when writing over the 100 MBit network.
