Thermaltake Max 4 Active Cooling Enclosure

Performance

To test the Thermaltake Max 4 a Western Digital 36 GB Raptor drive was used. Performance was measured with HDTach 3.0.4.0.




When used with a USB connection, the drive had a fairly steady transfer rate of 32.6MB per second. This shows the limitation of the USB connection, as we know that the drive itself can sustain a higher transfer rate than that. However, it should be noted that the CPU utilization was somewhat high at 18% for the testing. The test was run multiple times to verify the CPU usage, which never got as high as 18% again. In fact, the second HD Tach screen above shows a utilization of 0%, although the transfer rate dropped slightly as well.




When used with the eSATA connection, the performance increased as expected. The drive managed an average transfer rate of 58.5MB per second, which is right in line with internal SATA performance. Notice how the CPU utilization was also much lower for the eSATA connection, dropping from 18% down to 3%. The CPU utilization number dropped to 1% on additional eSATA testing.

Also, during normal usage the Western Digital Raptor located in the Thermaltake Max 4 reported an average internal temperature of 26ºC. After stressing the drive with heavy benchmarking, the temperature only rose to 27ºC. When the drive was left to run overnight the temperature stayed between 24ºC and 28ºC, which probably had more to do with the furnace cycling up and down more than anything else. The enclosure stays cool to the touch, and the drive ran cooler in the Max 4 than when the drive was installed in the system (usually about 31ºC).