Kensington SD4000 Docking Station Review

USB 3.0 Performance

As previously mentioned, testing the USB performance of a hub is an easy task. What we’re interested in here isn’t the maximum possible speeds, but rather if it has any impact on the transfers speeds compared to using a direct connection. First the drive is connected to the USB hub and tested with several applications after which it will be connected to the same onboard USB port instead of the hub for a second test. Below you’ll find charts showing you the comparison in any easy way.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO Disk Benchmark is a performance measurement tool is for Windows. It measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for both reads and writes. It has multiple options available to customize your performance measurement, including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.

ATTO can be used to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives so it is a popular tool everywhere.

AS SSD

The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system caches. In Sequential tests, the program measures the time it takes to read and write a 1 GB file respectively. To give a clearer picture of the drives tested, I’ve chosen to include all tests. Special the copy test is one that I think is relevant on the consumer level as it gives the user a view

To give a clearer picture of the drives tested, I’ve chosen to include all tests, also the copy test. While it isn’t the most static test, I think it is a relevant test in the eyes of consumers, giving them a view into one of the operations they’re going to be doing many times.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random 4KB/512KB read/write speeds.

Conclusion

There was a minor reduction in speed when using the Kensington SD4000 universal docking station, but it’s barely worth mentioning. It was also to be expected, much in the same way that you’ll loose a little in any other USB hub and the little that you do lose is nothing that you’ll ever notice in any real-world application scenarios.