ICY DOCK MB559US-1SMB: eSATA Enclosure with Pizzazz

PCMark05 Performance

We are utilizing the HDD test suite within PCMark05 for further comparative hard disk scores as it provides a mixture of actual application results and specific read/write percentages utilized within these programs. It is also a readily available benchmark that others can use for comparative purposes. The program utilizes the RankDisk application within the Intel iPEAK SPT suite of tools to record a trace of disk activity during usage of real world applications. These traces are then replayed to generate performance measurements based upon the actual disk operations within each application. The HDD test suite contains 53% read and 47% write operations with each trace section utilizing varied amounts of read or write operations. Additional information about the test suite can be found in PDF format here PCMark05 whitepaper.





Our overall PCMark05 score indicates the internal SATA connection is less than a percent faster than the eSATA setup and about 74% faster than the USB 2.0 connection. However, in the important application and general hard disk usage tests we see the eSATA setup outperforming the internal SATA configuration with the USB 2.0 system performing well.

Although not shown, our eSATA connection had slightly lower scores in the anti-virus and write sections of the test that caused the lower overall score. Our USB 2.0 setup scored 25.6 in the write test compared to 83.2 for the internal SATA connection. This along with a score of 29.4 compared to 137.2 in the anti-virus tests contributed to the greatly reduced PCMark05 total score.