I-Rocks IR-9300 3.5" HDD Enclosure

Performance

USB 2.0

A Samsung T133 300GB 8MB cache 7200RPM drive was used for our performance tests.


The USB interface is quite constant at 26MB/s throughout the entire drive. This is not very fast compared to other USB 2.0 hard drive enclosures.




This image shows how the hard drive behaves when hooked up directly to the IDE channel (blue) compared to the USB speed achieved (red). As you can see, the Samsung hard drive is always faster on IDE compared to USB 2.0.


The ATTO Disk Benchmark gives us the same results as HD Tach. The IR-9300 Combo maxes out at just over 26MB/s.

Firewire

The actual performance with Firewire is almost 10MB/s faster than USB 2.0. This means the the I-Rock actually performs very well on firewire. The CPU utilization went from 8% to 0%. You may notice the dip in performance toward the end of the benchmark. This is due to the Samsung drives outer reading speed being less than the performance of the firewire. This means that the hard drive became the bottleneck towards the outer edge of the performance test.




The ATTO scores show a large jump in read speed, while the write speed shows only a smal MB gain.