The SansDigital MobileStor was tested using both eSATA and USB interfaces, to see how the unit scales with both modes. We also tested RAID 1 and RAID 0 arrays, and compared this performance with an internal SATA hard drive. We used the same model of hard drive in all tests, to level the playing field.
- Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600 CPU (check prices)
- 8GB OCZ PC2-8500 (check prices)
- Asus P5W Deluxe motherboard (motherboard prices)
- Panasonic Blu-ray drive (check prices)
- 2 x Western Digital 250GB HDDs (check HDD prices)
- HD Tune Pro
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||
|
Hard Drive Performance
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
 |
As expected, performance is limited to USB’s interface, but eSATA unleashes the power of your drive array. If you think you’ll actually need more than 30MB/second of throughput, then you’ll want to stay away from the advanced RAID modes of this enclosure, and simply go RAID 0 or RAID 1 on the entirety of both drives.
To test disaster recovery, we pulled one of the drives out, which essentially simulates a hard drive failure. The unit immediately starts flashing its LEDs. When using RAID 1, you can still read and write to the array, but changes will not be mirrored until the array is rebuilt. As soon as the drive is re-inserted (or a new drive of the same or more capacity is inserted), the enclosure immediately starts rebuilding. The warning LED switches between red and blue, and it takes a few hours for the rebuild to complete.
