Testing is a fairly easy yet very subjective thing to do. There are too many dynamics to make an objective measurement. First off, the USB port is much slower than your SATA port. USB 2.0 enclosures all perform about the same, due to the somewhat limited bandwidth available on the USB 2.0 bus. So that's factor one. The second obviously being the differences in HDDs.

We took a pretty regular Western Digital Caviar 250GB SATA300 drive, connected it and simply had a peek at read/write speeds of bigger files as we assume you'll be using the driver for MP3 or media storage.

The results returned were actually normal HDD speeds. A 1 GB file copied in roughly half a minute. We spotted random read's of 40 MB/sec, write speeds of up-to 35 MB/sec. All in all pretty normal overall performance for a HDD. As stated though, access times will be higher on that USB port. So expect a little lag if for example you were to run games from the HDD. But again, this is external storage, not the latest miracle.

Do you want to go JBOD and combine the disk as one big partition ? Not a problem either. Your Operating System should take care of this as Windows XP and Windows Vista won't need drivers.

The Verdict

Eagle Consus I-series is without a doubt in my mind recommendable for those who seek an easy to use non-complex device to quickly move around files with. Obviously, connect it to an USB 2.0 port for actual performance as reported above. Though not benchmarked, a nice feature is JBOD and even Raid 0 where you can make one big partition out of two drives, yet that's a little niche and I doubt many will actually use it. See, if one drive fails you'll lose the data on the other as well. Which is a culprit.

The Eagle Consus I-series is a pretty cheap to purchase product, yet it's definitely quality. There's nothing complex or difficult about this product. It's easy to use and does as advertised, all that at a grand (35 USD) price and a nice design. Really, you can't go wrong here.

Definitely recommended.

Thanks to Eagle Tech for sending over this sample. Shipping to the EU was likely more expensive than the product costs. :)