SilverStone Storage MS02

Performance:

When it came to our usual Linux testing of the unit, it was one of the first drive enclosures to possess compatibility conflicts with Fedora Core and the Linux 2.6 kernel. Using Fedora Core 4 and the Linux 2.6.15-1.1831 kernel, the device would automatically mount with the 2.5" drive installed; however, it would continually crash GNOME's Nautilus and was home to a multitude of related problems. Luckily, switching over to the latest Fedora Core 5 Test 3 release, and tapping into Rawhide, we had experienced no compatibility issues with the SilverStone Storage MS02. Linux users should be forewarned of possible compatibility issues depending upon the distribution, however, new releases should not possess the initial issues we faced. SilverStone Technology does state official compatibility with Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP and Macintosh OS. Using SilverStone's proprietary software, users can also use the one touch backup solution with the enclosure; however, no Linux port is available thus rendering it a traditional drive enclosure. For our read and write transfer tests for this review, the testing had occurred on the system listed below.

The hard drive that we installed inside of the SilverStone MS02 was Hitachi's Travelstar HTS541080G9AT00. The 2.5" ATA-6 Hitachi HTS541080G9AT00 offers 80GB of storage, 5400RPM spin-rate, and 8MB of cache. Installing the device inside of the MS02 was effortless, simply remove the drive tray followed by temporarily removing the PCB and attaching it to the drive, and finally put the unit back together. The entire process can be completed within a matter of minutes.

In addition to publishing SilverStone MS02 results with the Hitachi Travelstar HTS541080G9AT00, we also executed the same set of tests with the drive inside of a Bytecc Hotdrive (HD-201U2) and Enermax Laureate (EB205U-S). All of our tests for this review are real-world centric by measuring the direct read-time using hdparm (which alleviates the file system overhead), copying a single large file over to the device, measuring the time to copy the file placed on the hard drive into a different location on the same drive, and measuring the time to copy hundreds of moderately sized files over to the device. With each of the enclosures, the Hitachi 80GB HDD was freshly formatted to FAT32 using QtParted v0.4.5. The file used during the single copy test was America's Army v2.5.0 for Linux with full installer (775.8MB) and the multiple file copy occurred using 359 unique RPM packages with a total size of 512.3MB.