Testing

I used Sandra’s HDD benchmarking tool to see how fast the drives where when used outside of the case.

You can connect the Luxon to your PC via USB or SATA whether you are using a SATA HDD or not. This means that an IDE HDD can run over SATA. I ran an IDE and a SATA drive in the Luxon, which were both made by Western Digital, and I ran the tests over both SATA and USB2.

Here are the results:

When using SATA the speed seems to top out at 13mb/s where obviously the SATA connection is limiting the max possible transfer rate, and not the HDD itself. USB 2 seemed to be the faster method of connecting to your PC. I also found that the SATA connection would only work if I restarted my PC with the Luxon connected. This is contrary to the claim saying that SATA is hot-swappable. However, this might be due to the fact that my mobo does not have the hot-swappable function. When I removed the Luxon from my computer when it was connected via SATA it would lock up and not respond.

SATA HDD’s are faster it would seem in this test which is what we expect. However, USB 2’s full bandwidth (60mb/s) isn’t really used by the Luxon.