Testing (continued):

To begin, I performed a baseline on how the drive performs when attached directly to the system with a standard 80-pin IDE cable. As you can see, the baseline test performed by HD Tach 3.0 reported an average read speed of 54.7MB/s, with a burst of 95.8MB/s.


Here you can see the transfer rate as reported by HD Tach 3.0 while the enclosure is connected using the USB 2.0 connection. This is what I expected out of a USB connection, a fairly constant read speed averaging 32.8MB/s.


The final test using HD Tach 3.0 was to monitor the transfer rate over the Ethernet connection. I was expecting a slightly faster speed than I received with the USB, instead I was surprised at how slow the Ethernet connection was. I received a very stable 10.9MB/s read time in both the sequential and the burst. I am told that this is actually not surprising, as other NAS devices perform around the same speed.


Now let's take a look at some real world transfer rates. These tests were performed watching the Windows XP clock, and each file was transferred five times to various directories and the average of those transfer times is listed below. The test file was a 350MB video file. As you can see, the read and write speed was identical when using the Ethernet connection. Using the USB2.0 connection, the same file was transferred in almost 1/3 of the time as over the Ethernet connection.


Finally, using HD Tach I compared the only common connection between the TelStar TLD-3500, Vantec NexStar 3, and Vizo Luxon... the USB 2.0 connection. As you can see all three devices transferred data close to the same speed. However, the TelStar TLD-3500 surprised me by outperforming the NexStar 3 by 1 MB/s. This may seem like a small amount, but if you transfer a large amount of data you might save yourself a little bit of time.