Directory  Reviews Storage Reviews |
| Eagle Consus M-Series SATA to USB External Storage Review |
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| Wednesday, 30 July 2008 | |
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Page 4 of 5 Performance For our purposes we decided to use a Seagate ST3120026AS 120GB Barracuda SATA drive, simply because it was a handy spare SATA drive we had lying around. For comparison purposes we pitted it against the Seagate FreeAgent Desktop 320GB drive we tested last year. Though the FreeAgent uses a considerably larger and faster SATA drive, both drives are heavily I/O bound by the SATA-to-USB bridge interfaces they employ, so the actual benchmark testing will be comparing their bridge interfaces more than the drives themselves. We tested the drives cleanly formatted connected to the same USB 2.0 ports on the following system...
We used HDTune 3.10 and Sisoft Sandra XI Professional Edition for benchmark testing. In HDTune 3.10, you can see quite clearly that the drives are I/O bound by the USB2.0 interfaces they employ, with the actual differences in performance more about the SATA-USB bridges they use than the drives themselves. The Consus unit edges out the Seagate FreeAgent drive in access time and burst rate, but only slightly. Conversely the Seagate unit edges out the Consus on average, minimum, and maximum throughput rate. In reality, the differences are negligable and basically unnoticable except when peering at the results on a graph. 
Impressions A device such as this one is more about how easy it is to use than about how the device performs. Though not as portable as devices that utilize laptop drives and USB supplied power, the Eagle Consus M is far more convenient than the Seagate FreeAgent or the Western Digital Mybook series for several reasons. 
Let's wrap things up! |