MacBook Pro eSATA with 2TB Guardian Maximus RAID-1 Mirror

The Guardian Maximus used here was a 2TB RAID-1 mirror enclosure. It contained two 2TB Hitachi 7K2000 hard drives internally, to guard against failure of either drive, presenting 2TB of usable capacity while allowing failure of one drive. It is an excellent choice for near-line backup, Time Machine, and similar purposes.

Unlike most 2TB volumes, which perform badly with Firewire 800 writes, the GMAX performs as well as one can expect with Firewire 800.

Analysis

Here we show Firewire 800 performance as well, which is as fast as FW800 ever goes on reads. But as shown, eSATA provides a welcome bump up in performance over Firewire 800.

All three eSATA cards provide excellent performance at the maximum possible speed.

As a bit of a head-scratcher, the GMax runs at the speed of a single Hitachi 7K2000, which is fast, but a bit more would have been nice. A RAID-1 mirror should be able to run at faster read speeds by reading from both mirrored drives.

MB/sec, longer is faster

Write speed is excellent for the OWC Slim and Sonnet Tempo Pro. lagging with the Sonnet Edge. Firewire 800 is far behind.

MB/sec, longer is faster