Use

To test the unit we have used a Seagate Momentus 80GB 2.5 inch SATA drive and a 3.5 inch Samsung 250 GB drive for testing. Both run at 7200 RPM and should push the envelope of any USB 2.0 interface.


A red LED next the blue one lights up as soon as the hard drive is accessed.

Performance

USB 2.0

The AXP dock manages an excellent 33.1 MB/s read speed. So it joins the few hard drive enclosures, which manage over 33 MB in this benchmark. The CPU utilization on the other hand is merely average.




ATTO returns the same result as HD Tach and complements the benchmark with write scores. These are not too shabby for an enclosure, although there are faster ones out there.

Benchmarking the AXP Dock with a 2.5 inch drive yields the exact same write speeds but slightly lower read benchmarks. This is due to the 2.5 inch drive becoming the limiting factor in the latter test. The identical write speed shows us, that the dock performs just as well with a 2.5 inch drive as with the larger one.

eSATA

The whole point of eSATA is to enable the same speeds of a SATA drive while being externally accessible. The AXP dock does just that and performs as you would expect. The benchmark results are comparable to the Samsung drive being run straight off the mainboard's internal SATA connector.


The same goes for the write speeds. These are results well above anything a USB 2.0 interface can handle and the hot swap functionality of eSATA makes this dock a nice addition to any test bench.