Testing
The testing system being used is made up of the following components.
AMD FX 8350
ASUS 990FX Crosshair Formula Z
16GB G.Skill DDR3 1866mhz
2x Western Digital Black 1TB SATA ll drives
Window 8
HDTune Pro Software
All testing will be done via USB 3.0 as almost all current motherboards and laptops have USB 3 ports.
In order to get the drives into the NexStar you have to put them in the hard drive brackets. One of the things I had a issue with was that the top drive was pretty hard to unlock to be in order to pull out the bracket. It requires a little bit of brute force even after the first time you unlock it.
The first set of tests will be done with a single drive in the NexStar HX2R while running Write and Read tests with HDTune Software.
Single Drive Test
Read average: 96.5 MB/s
Write average: 79.4 MB/s
The second set of tests being run will be with both drives in RAID 0 as most of you already know that RAID 0 is for Performance with no data security. As you can see there is an added bonus of running drives in RAID 0. There is performance gain and also makes your drive act like one big drive instead of 2 separate drives.
RAID 0 Test
Read average: 119.0 MB/s
Write average: 94.5 MB/s
Third and final test is of the NexStar setup in RAID 1 which offers a complete redundancy with storage. Say you put in 2 1TB drives in RAID 1 it will show up as just 1TB. The neat things with RAID 1 is that your files are being mirrored on 2 different drives for added security so that if one drive fails you are able to get data back. You can see that putting the drives in RAID 1 gives you little to no gain over a single drive. But you will be getting the added security of your data being safe.
RAID 1 Test
Read average: 97.6 MB/s
Write average: 81.0 MB/s