Mediasonic USB 3.0 RAID Enclosure Benchmark with 13″ Retina MacBook Pro

Just want to close the loop on the benchmark tests of the Mediasonic USB 3.0 RAID Enclosure I purchased earlier this year.  The Mediasonic USB 3.0 RAID Enclosure has been working solidly with my Mac Mini using a FireWire 800 connection.  Once I got the 13″ Retina MacBook Pro, I connected the drive enclosure to the USB 3.0 port.  The reconnection was flawless, there is nothing to reconfigure and all the data remains unchanged.  The benchmark shows a pretty nice improvement in speed over the FireWire 800 connection. In essence, when connecting it via the USB 3.0 connection, it has a similar speed to connecting it via a eSATA connection (See the RAID 10 configuration test result of this post).  So how does this compare to the SSD drive inside the MBP, and a straight up USB 3.0 external drive?

The internal SSD of the MBP has pretty good speed for today’s SSD standard. This also makes booting up and accessing files much faster.  I still remember how fast the MacBook Air was when I first got it. Of course, I have gotten used to this speed now and moving on to a MacBook Pro didn’t feel as dramatic as it did when I moved from an 2008 iMac to the 2011 MacBook Air.  Nonetheless, I would not expect any less speed than this from a similarly priced computer.

As for a regular, non-RAID single-drive, external drive connected to the MBP using the same USB 3.0 port, you can see the read and write speeds are quite a bit lower than the Mediasonic USB 3.0 RAID enclosure.  This drive I am testing with is a Western Digital MyBook Essential USB 3.0 1.5TB version.  It is about 40% the speed of the RAID enclosure.

So there you have it.  The Mediasonic USB 3.0 RAID Enclosure performs very well with Apple hardware, especially if it has USB 3.0 connections.  Too bad Apple does not provide eSATA ports on their computers.  Otherwise, I would have used that instead of USB 3.0.

2 replies
  1. Gerald Berzins
    Gerald Berzins says:

    Have you tried the new USB3.0 – eSATA connector from (Data-optics – got mine thru Amazon) that allows an eSATA enclosure with port multiplier to be connected to any Mac with USB3.0? The eSATA connector/USB3 connector is small (size of a flash drive) and features a standard eSATA port and allows connections via port multiplier.

    Reply
    • Kam
      Kam says:

      Hi Gerald, no I didn’t get that piece of hardware. The USB 3.0 connection works well so I just left it. What is your experience with the eSATA to USB 3.0 convertor?

      Kam

      Reply

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