Coolmax Gemini CD-309-U2 3.5" External HDD Enclosure

Using the External Drive:

Once again,  I used a 120GB Western Digital Caviar hard drive with 8MB cache and 7200RPM. This hard drive was absolutely brand new and just removed from the sealed original static bag. This assures that the best and purest performance can be had from the drive. The first problem that hit me was I remembered Windows XP doesn't acknowledge the existence of unformatted drives. Normally you would use a disk utility floppy during boot to format a new drive, but I neither have the floppy (because the drive was OEM), nor do I even use a floppy drive. I found out that the format can be done using computer management.

Go to Start Menu->Settings->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management. From here you go down and click on "Disk Management." This will display a list of all drives, formatted and unformatted, and their status. The drive shows up on my system as "Drive 2" and unformatted. Using disk management I formatted the drive and mapped it to F:. After being formatted the drive is now displayed as healthy and is listed under my computer. It can now be used as if it were a normal internal hard drive.

Benchmarking the Enclosure:

Now that everything is assembled and installed it's time to take a look at how this unit performs. I will be using several benchmarks including HD Tach, SiSoft Sandra File System/Removable Media, timed file transfer, and media play tests.

I ran both the file system and the removable media benchmark with SiSoft Sandra 2004 Pro, as well as the HD Tach v2.7 benchmark, to get an idea of what transfer speeds could be achieved with this product. The following are my results.

The Sandra benchmarks show that for continuous write/read operations you could expect about 23MBps, which isn't anywhere close to the theoretical 60MBps USB 2.0 speed, but is what you can expect in the real world with this type of device. The same drive installed internally offers about twice the read/write speed.

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The HD Tach bench confirms a 23MBps read speed and also shows how much processor power is utilized in order to perform the read, in this case it is 18.5% which isn't too heavy for this type of action.

Next, I measure the amount of time it takes to transfer a 1.00GB folder containing a mix of pictures and videos to the external drive. After 3 trials, an average of 58 seconds is established for the transfer which equates to about 17.6MBps average transfer rate. This gives an actual benchmark of real world transfer rates when there are multiple files of large variance in size.

The last test I performed was a simple one to check the performance of the enclosure for everyday use. I played some videos and music directly from the external drive. Music and videos performed flawlessly when being played from this drive. They played instantly with no lag time or problems.