Tagan Icy Box IB-3218 Series Review

Testing:

To complete and round out the review, I am going to run some tests on the Icy Box to see just how well it performs in real world situations. To get a good idea of how it performs, I will be using OCC's standard test hard drive (1 x Seagate 750GB SATA) in the enclosure and will be testing it against the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 250GB, as well as a Western Digital Caviar that is connected directly to my computer's SATA bus, and another external enclosure, the Eagle Consus.

Testing Setup:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 (333x8)
• Motherboard: Gigabyte X48-DQ6 w/BIOS F7b
• Memory: Mushkin XP2 8000 Redline 2 x 2GB 5-5-5-12
• Video Card(s): Asus EN8800GT
• Power Supply: Mushkin 800w Modular Power Supply
• Hard Drive: 1 x Western Digital Caviar 500GB
• OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

Comparison Drives:

• External USB: Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 250GB
• External USB: Eagle Consus.
• Internal SATA: Western Digital Caviar 500GB

Benchmarks:

• Average Transfer Rate (HD Tune)
• Access Time (HD Tune)
• Burst Rate (HD Tune)
• CPU Usage (HD Tune)
• Physical Disk Drive Index (SiSoft Sandra Professional XIIc)
• Physical Disk Access Time (SiSoft Sandra Professional XIIc)
• File Systems (SiSoft Sandra Professional XIIc)
• Transfer of a 10, 100, and 500 Mb test file (.zip format)

HD Tune:

HDTune measures disk performance to make comparisons between drives or disk controllers.

SiSoft Sandra:

Sandra is a benchmarking utility designed to test all areas of a computer system. The area we are going to be looking at is the Physical Disk Performance and File System portion.

Test File Transfer:

These test files are created by OCC and used on all of our test suites like these. Time is measured by stopwatch.