Enermax Laureate

Performance:

With the amount of data we transfer internally here at Phoronix whether it be preparing a system for testing or performing routine file backups, a great deal of our concern is placed upon data transfer speeds. For our purposes today, we installed a Toshiba Super Slimline 40GB 2.5" HDD. The Toshiba MK4025GAS has a spin-rate of 4200RPMs and 8MB cache with 12ms average seek time and 7.14ms average latency while everything is powered by a Fluid Dynamic Bearing motor. Installing the drive was incredibly simple just needing to remove two screws to gain access to the innards followed by sliding the drive in and connecting it to the ATA-6 interface. As with most computer manufacturers, no Linux compatibility is stated and in the case of the Enermax Laureate is support for Microsoft Windows 98/98SE/2000/ME/XP or Mac OS 8.6 and higher. In our testing, we had no troubles mounting the device on various distributions with both Linux 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Below are the laptop specifications for which we have performed the official benchmarking.

In our testing, we went with our traditional media storage (including flash memory) benchmarking. Our three tests focused upon using HDparm for performing timed disk reads, measuring the time to copy a single 104.5MB archive over to the device, and finally the time to copy over 135 JPG files weighing in at a total of 106.2MB. During this testing, the 40GB Toshiba HDD was EXT3 formatted. For comparison of the Enermax external enclosure, we also benchmarked a BYTECC Hotdrive 2.5" USB 2.0 (HD-201U2) with the same hard drive.