In this test, we setup the board with the external SATA enclosure from Data Tec and ran 3 benchmarks with it. The HDD used in the enclosure is a 80GB SATA II HD from Hitachi model 7K80. As we do not have a USB enclosure that fits a SATA II HDD, we used our Vantec NexStar 3 and put in a IDE HDD. The HDD used is a IBM Deskstar 20.5G HDD.

HDTach 3

The difference between USB and eSATA connection is more apparent with HD Tach. Using the eSATA enclosure, we get around a burst speed of 201.3MB/s, a random access time of 13.1ms and CPU utilisation of 2%. Avg Read if 48.8MB/s . That is as good as testing a SATA II HDD connected directly to the SATA II port on the mainboard.

Next we used our USB enclosure with a IDE HDD. The burst speed is only 31MB/s. That is way below to a standard IDE HDD connected thru IDE port. In other parameters, it has a read of 17.7ms, a higher CPU utilisation of 9% and a average read of 26.6MB/s.

Apparently, the average read is almost doubled when we used the eSATA connection compared to a USB enclosure.

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