Thermaltake BlacX HDD Docking Station

Testing

The following system was used to test the Thermaltake BlacX HDD Docking Station:

CPU:	Intel E6850 Core2 Duo
Clock speed:	9 x 333 MHz = 3.0 GHz, Memory at DDR2-667
Motherboard:	Asus P5W DH Deluxe
Memory:	2 x 1GB G.Skill F2-6400PHU1-2GBHZ
Video Card:	Gigabyte GV-NX62TC256DS
Harddisk:	200 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM IDE
Power Supply:	Antec 500W
Operating System:	Windows XP Pro SP2

To see what the Seagate is capable of, the drive was first tested connected as a SATA drive. The results above show the 5400 RPM drive gives average read results of 33.9 MB/s under 1% CPU utilization. Pay special attention to the read speed starting at the 37.5 GB mark on the chart.


Here the same drive is installed in the Thermaltake BlacX and connected via the USB 2.0 cable. The drive's read speed lingers right around 31 MB/s, right up until the 37.5 GB mark where the drive's SATA performance above goes below this line. Unfortunately, this is the limit of the drive, and the end user may very well see different results with different drives used. With a larger or faster drive, the read speeds may never drop below the USB limit.


The first graph above shows average reads of the Seagate drive in SATA and USB speeds, and for comparison they are paired with a Sandisk Cruser Micro 4GB flash drive and a PNY Attache 512MB flash drive. SATA reads are obviously fastest, but the same drive under USB 2.0 is not far behind. Both flash drives perform worse than the SATA drive in the BlacX, especially the PNY drive with less than 10 MB/s reads. The second graph above shows CPU utilization averaged under three tests for each drive. The Seagate drive under USB 2.0 averages a modest 4% CPU utilization, which in reality was between 0% (twice) and 11% (once).