3.5"/ 5.25" USB 2.0 External Drive Enclosure
& USB 2.0 5-Port PCI Card

Date Reviewed: May 30, 2002
Reviewed By: Jason Rabel
Price: ~$80 Enclosure & ~$30 Card
Company: Extreme PC Gear

Benchmarks (Cont):

Next up are the HD Tach benchmarks. These screen shots are chock full of info which help break down how each connection functioned, including CPU utilization, which USB 2.0 does seem to eat up quite a bit.

Internal

USB 2.0

USB 1.1

Very interesting to see the read speed much lower than what the devices are capable of. However, proportionally I think it is right on target. The USB 2.0 read speed numbers are about half of what the internal drive numbers are, and the USB 1.1 are, well, they are there... Both USB graphs seemed pinned to the top which to me would indicate that bandwidth was the limiting factor.

Internal

USB 2.0

USB 1.1

The WinBench numbers pretty much confirm what the other benchmarks show, but you can also compare performance with several popular applications that are run with the test. These numbers don't show as big of a gap between an internal hard drive and USB 2.0. Also included are some more CPU utilization numbers.

Lastly I ran some PCMark HDD benchmarks. While nothing spectacular, these numbers give a very simple distinction between each connection.

Internal	USB 2.0
USB 1.1

Conclusions:

USB 2.0 certainly packs quite a punch and shows that it can definitely keep up with the Jones'. I'm all for faster connections and all, but having both a USB 2.0 PCI card & Firewire card in my system to connect to external devices seems a little excessive. Hopefully USB 2.0 will replace the standard onboard USB ports on motherboards very soon in the future, I wouldn't mind seeing firewire integrated in as a standard feature too.

After using the external drive for a while as part of my system (for running programs, not just for transferring files), the speed seems almost indistinguishable to the internal drive. If you run out of space inside your computer, or just want something that is portable, an external USB drive is about as easy as it gets.

Also, for the price you can't go wrong. I was looking up external USB 2.0 hard drives online and they aren't cheap. Buying a more versatile enclosure like this allows you to easily swap out a larger hard drive or CD-RW down the road, depending on your needs.

Once again I would like to thank Extreme PC Gear for the hook-up. They have this enclosure, as well as other combos with hard drives or CD-RW drives in stock ready to go.

Pros:
  Extremely simple assembly & installation
  USB 2.0 offers much faster speeds
  Versatile usage with just about any IDE device
  Backwards compatible with USB 1.1

Cons:
  Not as fast as internal drive

Rating:
  For the Normal User: 9.5 of 10
  For the Extreme Gamer: 9.5 of 10
  For the Extreme Overclocker: 9.5 of 10

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