Kensington SD4000 Docking Station Review

Testing & Methodology

The graphic part of the Kensington SD4000 works straight out and as such isn’t anything to benchmark here. The USB and LAN abilities on the other hand, is something that I can test and compare. I will be connecting my trusted Angelbird SSD2go Pocket 512GB USB 3.0 SSD to the docking station and test how it is performing there. Then I’ll disconnect the docking station and connect the drive directly to the same USB connector on the motherboard that previously connected the docking station. This will give us a great view on performance impact, if any, happening from the docking station. We should expect a minor fluctuation, but it is to be seen on the next pages how it will hold up.

The network connection is the second thing that I can test and compare, and in a very similar way to the USB testing. Naturally I won’t be using my SSD here but rather connect the system through the LAN port on the SD4000 docking station and run several of my network benchmarks there. When those are done,  I’ll connect it to the onboard Intel i217 LAN controller instead and run the same benchmarks. Again, this will give us a great comparison of performance impact through the conversion via USB 3.0, if any.

Hardware

• Supermicro C7Z97-OCE
• Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3
• Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz
• Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
• Sapphire R7 240 2GB
• BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850W
• Thermaltake Water 3.0 Performer
• Asus PCE-AC68 Dual-Band wireless adaptor

We would like to thank our sponsors for supplying us with the equipment needed to perform these tests.

Software

• AS SSD
• ATTO
• CDM
• Lan Speed Test
• PassMark PerformanceTest Suite
• Windows 7 Ultimate