To test the Sunbeamtech Airbox USB 3.0 enclosure I'm using a 500Gb Seagate 7200.10 SATA-II drive. I put the drive through a series of benchmarks first connected via the onboard SATA port, shown on the left side graphs, followed by the same drive connected via the Airbox USB 3.0, shown in the right side graphs.


Using the ATTO disk benchmark, we see that the SATA interface shows a slightly faster result on the smaller files than USB 3.0 does. This matches what we've seen on other USB 3.0 drive devices. However average and maximum bandwidth is very similar.


In CrystalDiskMark we find two sets of nearly identical numbers. In the case of sequential and random writes we even find the USB 3.0 consistently performing slightly better than the SATA connection.


HDTune also scores nearly identical on reads, with the only exception being burst rate, which reports a significantly lower 91MB/s via USB 3.0 than the 165MB/s recording using SATA.

Let's wrap things up with some final thoughts and conclusion.