Testing

As with other enclosures, we ran SiSoft Sandra XI to gain an insight into the speed of the enclosure.

This time, we will be comparing against Vizo’s other enclosure, the Luxon and the Silverstone MS04. All of the enclosures are using the same IDE 80GB Western Digital drive.

Each test was repeated three times and the results averaged for fair and accurate results. If one of these tests was very different from the others. The whole set of tests were scrapped and the testing repeated.

As you can see, the Milano is the worst performing of the lot. The additional circuitry required to make the Milano do its media thing/thang have lowered the overall efficiency of the USB transfer. The Luzon shows a much better speed that will be easily noticed when transferring large files. As the Milano can have a 500GB drive maximum, it would take ~290 minutes to fill (500000 / 1.024 = 488461, 488461 / 28mb/s = 17438s, 17438s / 60 = ~290 minutes) compared to 208 minutes for the MS04 via FireWire. Smaller files fly onto the Milano, but movies are a little bit more sluggish.

An eSATA connection would improve these results as USB isn’t the fastest connection to your PC anymore. In fact, as USB has to send more ‘command’ signals per piece of data, the slower rated FireWire is actually faster as less ‘command’ signals are sent. eSATA overcomes these problems as it has a larger bandwidth allowing for more data and ‘command’ signals.

Price

The Milano has just been released, and hence isn’t widely available. I expected the price to be in the range of £30-50. Unfortunately, I could only find it going for £70 ($140) which seems a little steep for a slow performing enclosure, even with media functions.

My guess is that the one shop that has it is charging a premium for the fact that only they have it. In the future I would expect the price to drop.