Thermaltake Vi-on 3.5 Hard Drive Enclosure Review

Testing:

To complete the review, I am going to run some tests on the Vi-on to see just how well it performs against real world competition. I will be using OverclockersClub's standard test hard drive (1 x Seagate 750GB SATA) in the enclosure and the testing will take place against the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 250GB as well as a Western Digital Caviar that is connected directly to the motherboard's SATA bus, and another external enclosure, the Eagle Consus.

Testing Setup:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450
• Motherboard: Gigabyte X48-DQ6 w/BIOS F7b
• Memory: 2 x 1GB Super Talent
• 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)
• Transfer of a 10, 100, and 500 Mb test file (.zip format)

HD Tune:

HDTune measures performance by comparing drives and disk controllers.

Test File Transfer:

These test files are created by OCC and used on all of our test suites like these to insure fair testing for all storage devices. Time is measured by stopwatch.

Performance of the test hard drive in the Vi-on enclosure performed almost as well as an internal drive and in some instances outperformed it when connected via e-SATA. When connected via USB the performance was almost identical to the other drive enclosures.