| Processor | Athlon XP 1.8GHz |
| Motherboard | SOYO KT333 Dragon Ultra |
| Memory | 256MB Crucial PC 2700 DDR SDRAM |
| Hard Drive | IBM 75GXP 60GB - ATA 100 |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional |
| Motherboard USB Drivers | SOYO USB 2.0 Driverv2.0.2 |
The TapeWare XE provides a graphical view of the operating speed of the drive. Once you turn on the ADR2 60USB drive, it takes around 10-15 seconds to initialize. Thereafter you're ready for action. In some instances if you have specified to format the cartridge it'll take a bit longer before the actual data backing up process starts. The following table shows the tests we carried out and the time taken.
File size | Time Taken | Speed (MB/sec) |
| 3GB of various utility programs downloaded from the web | 24 min | 2.1MB/sec |
| 20GB of Program files | 2hrs 42 min | 2.31MB/sec |
Below is a screen capture of another test where we were backing up some program files. As you can see, in both instances the drive performs close to 2MB/sec or over.
Performance of the drive is without doubt very impressive indeed. Most tape drives out there hardly go beyond the 1MB/sec mark and if you want to go higher, the cost is heartbreaking. I do not know how Onstream does it, but the price they offer these tape drives are simply amazing. Most other tape drives with similar functionality are priced well over US$1000, so these drives are unquestionably a great bargain.
With data compression we were able to get the speed up to around 4.1MB/sec but in all of the tests we did, we weren't able to reach 5MB/sec. Nevertheless it's still extremely impressive.
