Teratrend SST-TS431U 4-bay USB 3.0 Storage Tower Review

1. Introduction2. Packaging & Bundle3. Teratrend SST-TS413U Tower4. Testing Methodology & Performance5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

To test this enclosure we will be using two 1TB Seagate Barracuda drives, which offer speeds of up to 125 MB/s when plugged in directly via SATA III. We will test both drives individually via USB 3.0 and eSATA, and then set-up a Raid configuration to further test the maximum theoretical speed.

Processor: AMD Bulldozer FX 8-core 8150 CPU @ 4.2 GHz.
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3.
Cooler: Antec Kuhler H20 920 CPU Cooler.
Memory: 8GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 1800+ MHz.
Graphics Cards: AMD Radeon 6450 HD (GPU @ 850 MHZ, Memory Clock @ 1000 MHz).
Power Supply: Akasa Venom Power 750W.
Boot Drive: Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB (OS only).

OS: Windows 7 Home Edition 64bit.
Software: CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2.
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 1 TB x 2.

Testing the 2 x Seagate Barracuda 1TB drives over USB 3.0 gave us good results, peaking around the 125 MB/s mark.

We then connected the device via eSATA and the final results were remarkable close to the USB 3.0 results.

While there is no built-in raid controller in the TS413U we can set-up a striped volume using the built-in windows disk manager, however, you are only able to do this over eSATA and not USB 3.0. The performance of the Raid 0 volume increased noticeably, although the write speeds only increased by 10 MB/s compared to the read speed increase of 25 MB/s. If you were to set-up four drives in raid 0 you could get some decent speeds via eSATA but unfortunately we weren't able to test this today.

Overall the performance of this device is very promising, especially coupled with capable Hard Disk Drives.

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