Performance
We'll dive straight into our read tests.
Remember that we're using two different models of SATA and IDE drive. Interestingly, the IDE drive performed better in our tests, although the SATA drive was hosting the OS at the time of its testing. No other background tasks were running during testing, so this shouldn't have affected results a great deal. Anyway, different models and so different speeds, but they do give us native speeds to compare to bridged results
eSATA is very close in performance to SATA, as we'd expect, seeing as the Magic Bridge does nothing to the signalling. The performance difference is more likely due to the eSATA controller on the host system.
The Magic Bridge's USB 2.0 appears to provide slower reads than the Prolific bridge chipset found in the Icy Box. FireWire sits slightly above USB 2.0, but behind eSATA.
The Icy Box's USB 2.0 struggles with writes, it seems, while the Magic Bridge prospers. FireWire writes are consistent with its read speed. eSATA remains the quickest external interface, just over 1MB/s behind internal SATA.
In our 'general usage' test we simulate some more random reads and writes. It gives us an idea of how the devices cope when given tasks a little more colourful than straight backup, restore or copy operations.
Native Command Queuing, anyone? SATA prospers in this test. In fact, the PCIe eSATA controller beats NVIDIA's SATA controller, though the Magic Bridge doesn't really have anything to do with that. Both Magic Bridge and Icy Box show similar USB 2.0 performance, whilst FireWire doesn't stretch ahead that much; USB 2.0's packeted data transfer not hindering it in this particular access specification.
The bottom line on performance? The Magic Box will deliver everything a drive has to offer if hooked up over eSATA. USB 2.0 puts a damper on things, but the Magic Bridge's performance is more or less on a par with what we'd expect to see. To put it another way, hook up a SATA drive to the Magic Bridge and you'll get roughly 100% of the disk's performance, but hook up a (new-ish) IDE drive and you'll only see about 50% of its potential throughput.
