Akasa Elite S and Integral S 2.5″ Hard Drive Enclosures Review

1. Introduction2. Akasa Elite S Hard Drive Enclosure3. Akasa Integral S4. Akasa Card and Drive Reader5. Performance6. Closing Thoughts7. View All Pages

To test the two enclosures we used the USB3.0 connection on our ASRock 890GX motherboard.  To minimise any performance limitations with the hard drive, we chose to use a Kingston SSDNow V+ 64GB SSD drive in the enclosures.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.

A solid set of results all round for both enclosures.  The Elite S did lag behind the Integral S in every test, although in the real world the difference is barely noticeable.

We have been using HDTach for many years now and always find it is an invaluable benchmark to ascertain potential levels of performance. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

In the average read test, the Elite S performed better than the Integral S and in the burst read test, the results were almost identical.  There isn't really much to choose between the two drives in this test.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

Once again, the enclosures performed very similarly in the ATTO disk benchmark.

For our real world tests we used a mixed file folder making up 7.62 GB altogether.  In the test we copied these to and from the 64GB Kingston SSDNow V+100 drive.  Our test system featured a Kingston SSDNow V+100 128GB Solid State drive connected to one of our motherboard's SATA 6Gbps ports.

In the real world read tests there was very little to choose between the two enclosures again although the Elite S did lag behind the Integral S by four seconds in the read test and six seconds in the write test.

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