Macally G-S350SUA External Enclosure Review

If you ask me why I would choose Macally G-S350SUA to review, I will tell you that I was simply attracted by its Mac Pro-like looking.

For the same design, Macally actually has different models:

• G-S350SUA comes with eSATA, USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 interfaces;
• G-S350SUAB comes with eSATA, USB 2.0, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800 interfaces;
• G-S350SU comes with only eSATA and USB 2.0 interfaces.

I also want to test out the speed between Firewire 400 and USB, so I chose G-S350SUA instead of G-S350SU.

According to Wikipedia, USB 2.0 can reach 480Mbit/s whereas Firewire 400 can reach maximum 400Mbit/s; if you simply compare these two numbers, you will probably think USB is always faster than Firewire 400. Yet, this is not quite true.

I installed a 500GB Seagate hard drive in this Macally enclosure for testing.

First, I used AJA System Test to perform a 4GB file read and write.:

	The first test is done with one 1 USB port is used (only this external hard drive is used for that set of USB ports). The test result is very good comparing to what I have previously tested on LaCie’s Grand 1TB External Hard Drive. The Write Speed could reach up to 34.6 MB/s and Read Speed could reach up to 34.9MB/s
	The second test is plug in the USB cable from the external hard drive to the USB ports with keyboard and mouse running. The test result shows the Read and Write speed drops dramatically. To be more precise, the Write speed drops 30.0% (from 34.6MB/s to 24.2MB/s) and Read speed drops 23.5% (from 34.9MB/s to 26.7MB/s)
	The third test is using Firewire 400 cable. Seems like it’s a bit slower than USB; the test result shows that with Firewire 400, the Write speed is 24.8MB/s and Read speed is 22.9 MB/s.

You might now consider USB is surely faster than Firewire 400; however, according to what I observed, the more USB devices you plug in alone with the external hard drive, the slower the speed is. If you connect two USB drives at the same time, the Read/Write speed could drop down to 12MB/s. And for Firewire, seems like there is no effect on the speed change no matter how many Firewire devices I add in.

There are also some data I/O Transactions graph here for your reference:

Mono USB connection	Multi-USB connection	Firewire 400 connection

Macally G-S350SUA is a very good enclosure; it has elegant aluminum design and it’s very quite while running. It supports multiple connection interface to suite your needs in connecting it to various computers and get maximum speed. If you want better transfer speed, I think the model with Firewire 800 (G-S350SUAB) is your better option on Mac. However, all three models comes with eSATA port to give yous maximum speed of your hard drive (You will need to add on a eSATA PCI-e card to your Mac Pro or eSATA express card to previous model of Macbook Pro).