Testing:

To test the performance of the Kingwin JET eSATA/USB External Drive Enclosure, I installed an 80GB Seagate SATA 3Gbps hard drive. I will test the USB and eSATA data transfer rates on the following system:

» AMD X2 4200 AM2 processor
» Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe
» 2GB (2x1024MB) OCZ DDR2 8500 SLI RAM
» 2 eVGA 7900GTO cards in SLI
» Tagan TurboJet 1100W Power Supply
» 2x 80GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA 3Gbps hard drives in RAID 0
» 1x 120GB Seagate 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Memorex DVD/CDRW
» 10-in-1 Media Card reader
» Cooler Master CoolDrive IV
» Fans: 2x120mm LED

For a baseline I took a reading from the 80GB Seagate SATA 3Gbps hard drive prior to installing it in the Kingwin enclosure. As you can see, while connected directly to a SATA header on the test system's motherboard a burst speed of 207.8 MB/s and an average read speed of 61.2 MB/s were achieved.


The USB 2.0 connection of the enclosure was tested next. As might be expected, a USB connection doesn't match up to a SATA connection. The USB 2.0 connection provided a 36.3 MB/s burst speed and 34.9 MB/s average read speed.


Finally, the eSATA connection performs extremely well for an external connection. I would find it difficult to distinguish this from a direct SATA 150 MB/s connection. Receiving 145.7 MB/s during the burst test, and 62.6 MB/s average read times. I tried several times and was unable to get the full 3Gbps the hard drive is capable of.


Using the one touch back-up I was able to back up approximately 50GB of videos, totaling 1,430 files, in approximately 35 minutes over USB. Unfortunately I was unable to use the one touch back-up (or the back-up software) while connected to eSATA. It appears that this version of PCClone EX only supports USB devices (perhaps there is an updated version that supports eSATA). I did transfer the same files manually, and they transferred via the eSATA connection in approximately 15 minutes! That's over half the time to transfer them via USB 2.0.