Testing:
For testing purposes, a system with the following hardware was used:
» Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R motherboard
» Intel Core 2 Duo E6500 CPU
» 4GB OCZ Technology DDR2 memory
» 80GB Seagate SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» 4 1.5TB Seagate SATA 3Gbps hard drives
» 2 500GB Seagate SATA 3Gbps hard drives
» Plextor PX-B310SA optical drive
The
HornetTek Hover 3.5" Hard Drive Enclosure was installed with a new Seagate 320GB SATA 7200.11 hard drive.
To test the Hover enclosure I formatted the hard drive to NTFS with Windows XP. I used HDTach 3.0.40 to measure drive performance. Several measurements were taken with the hard drive installed by various methods. These included connecting the hard drive directly to the motherboard using a SATA II connection, installing the drive in the Hover enclosure, and installing the same drive in an
Icy Dock MB664US-1SB enclosure. Between each test the hard drive was reformatted to ensure it was in its optimal state.
The first test had the hard drive installed in the HornetTek Hover enclosure. HDTach was run three times, and each time the results were the same. The average read speed was 34.9MB/s, while the Burst Speed was slightly faster at 35.1MB/s.
For comparison purposes I placed the hard drive in the
Icy Dock MB664US-1SB enclosure. As with the HornetTek Hover, the average read speed was 34.9MB/s and the Burst Speed was 35.1MB/s.
Looking closer at the above benchmarks, the hard drive in the Hover used 4% of the CPU during use, while the Icy Dock used 2%. This little difference aside, there is not much that sets the performance of these two enclosures apart. The only other real difference is in the design, particularly with the Hover having the two 50mm fans included. Passive cooling may be fine for some, but there have been times where a passively cooled enclosure gets warm during heavy usage. Active cooling is always preferred, as it should help extend the life of your hard drive.
In order to test the effectiveness of the two 50mm cooling fans the temperature of the hard drive was monitored using Everest Ultimate Edition V5.01. The idle condition was established by allowing the hard drive to sit idle for 60 minutes, and the load condition was created by transferring 30GB of music and video files to the hard drive. In order to get a "real world" temperature test of the hard drive, the hard drive was installed inside a NZXT Lexa Blackline full tower case. As the chart below shows, the two 50mm cooling fans do a great job at keeping the hard drive running cooler than the other scenarios, and much cooler than the recommended maximum temperature reported by Seagate as 60C.
My final test was to determine whether the addition of the 2 50mm fans produced an easily noticeable noise. I am happy to say that while there is a slight hum, it is not overly loud or obnoxious. My computer is much louder than this enclosure.
