Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia Peripherals Hard drive adapter quality?

(The whole point of this is a question about hard drive adapters, but I’ve never learned to make a long story short. Hang in there, please!)

My IBM 320 SSDs reached their five-year warranty date without a hitch last month. I had two of them in an IcyDock housing in a RAID 0 configuration running 10.6.8. I paid £260 for the two 80 Gb drives in 2011. Why wait for them to fail? I figured I’d replace them with a 240 Gb Toshiba Q300 SSD for £50.

I needed an adapter to fit the 2 1/2” drive onto the sled in my 2010 Mac Pro. I ordered a £11 “General 2.5" SSD to 3.5" SATA Hard Disk Drive HDD Adapter Caddy Tray Cage Hot Swap Plug” from Amazon. A few days later I found out it was coming from China and the delivery date was supposed to be May 4. I already had my Toshiba SSD and wanted the adapter NOW! So, I bit the bullet and ordered an “ICY DOCK EZConvert Air Lite MB482SP-3B SATA I, II, & III 2.5" to 3.5" Hard Drive/Solid State Drive Converter/Mount” from SCAN in the UK. The original Amazon order surprised me by arriving the next day.

So, I screwed the SSD to the adapter, plugged it in and divided it into equal 120 Gb partitions – one for 10.6.8, one for 10.11.4.

I have a free utility called XBench. I don’t know how accurate it is, but it’s sort of like my bathroom scales: as long as it sets a baseline, the main thing is, is the score better or worse.

I ran XBench on a 7,200 rpm spinner. The result was 80. I ran XBench on my main drive: a 120 Gb Samsung EVO SSD mounted on a PCIe card. The result was 767. I ran XBench on the Toshiba mounted on the sled in the normal hard drive bay. The result was a disappointing 314.

Today, the SCAN delivery arrived. I took the £11 adapter out and replaced the Toshiba Q300 in the new £16 adapter. The XBench result was 430.

Does this seem right? That an adapter that is basically just a simple double-ended plug should yield such a different result?

Mainly, I was impressed with how much faster the SSD on the PCIe card is.