Venus DS3 External 3.5" Enclosure

Testing:

You can see here in my previous enclosure review about formatting a new drive to be used in an enclosure, also I will be using the exact same hard drive I used in that review. The drive is completely blank and formatted. When I turn on the enclosure windows recognizes the device.

I will be benchmarking the performance of the enclosure using HD Tach v2.7, SiSoft Sandra Pro 2004 file system/removable media benchmark, timed file transfer, and media play tests. 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.

I ran HD Tach multiple times and came up with almost the exact same result each time, the above screenshot shows the average of 14.2ms random access time and an average read speed of 19.0MBps. HD Tach also gives a CPU utilization of 18.4% for the enclosure which isn't too heavy for a sustained data transfer. The transfer rate over USB 2.0 is 480Mb, or 60MB. A read speed of 19.0MBps falls well below that, but is on par with other external enclosures. The Sandra file system benchmark supports the HD Tach bench with a drive speed index of 21MBps. The Sandra removable storage benchmark returns similar results with a max write speed of 22.3MBps and max read speed of 19.2MBps. The benchmarks show that an average transfer speed of about 20.3MBps can be expected. This same hard drive might run up to twice as fast when installed internally, but that's really due because of the increased bandwidth of Ultra ATA.

My next benchmark is a simple one; I just take a folder, fill it with 1GB of random pictures and videos, and measure the time it takes to transfer the folder to the external enclosure. Also I will measure the time it takes to transfer the files from the enclosure back to my internal hard drive. I will repeat each benchmark 3 times and take the average times.

The average real world write speed to the enclosure for a 1.04GB folder is (1024x1.04)/70. This equates to 15.2MBps write speed. The average real world read speed from the enclosure for the 1.04GB folder is (1024x1.04)/64. This equates to 16.6MBps read speed. These are slightly lower than the 19-25MBps reported in the benchmarks, most likely due to the extremely varied file size and large number of files (1428 files in all).

My final test is the easiest of all, and the most important as far as I'm concerned. I will just listen to some music and play some videos directly off of the external hard drive to see if everything runs smooth. I am very pleased after putting the external drive through it's paces. I was able to play 2 videos at once and scroll quickly through pictures without any lag or problems.