USB performance
Our USB transfer speed tests were conducted with a USB 2.0/Firewire external hard drive enclosure connected to a 7200RPM Maxtor 740X-6L hard drive. We tested with HD Tach 3.01's 8MB zone setting.

The A8V Deluxe manages slightly higher USB read speeds than the AV8, but with marginally higher CPU utilization.

Firewire performance
Our Firewire transfer speed tests were conducted with the same external enclosure and hard drive as our USB transfer speed tests.

Firewire performance is essentially a tie. It's particularly impressive to see neither board consume many CPU cycles during Firewire transfers.

Ethernet performance
We evaluated Ethernet performance using the NTttcp tool from the Microsoft's Windows DDK. The docs say this program "provides the customer with a multi-threaded, asynchronous performance benchmark for measuring achievable data transfer rate".

We used the following command line options on the server machine:

ntttcps -m 4,0,192.168.1.25 -a
..and the same basic thing on each of our test systems acting as clients:
ntttcpr -m 4,0,192.168.1.25 -a
Our server was a Windows XP Pro system based on Chaintech's Zenith 9CJS motherboard with a Pentium 4 2.4GHz (800MHz front-side bus, Hyper-Threading enabled) and CSA-attached Gigabit Ethernet. A crossover CAT6 cable was used to connect the server to each system.

When compared with the AV8, the A8V Deluxe's GigE throughput is a little disappointing. However, the Deluxe's performance here matches what we've seen from most PCI-bound GigE solutions.

I would have liked to test WiFi-g performance with NTtttcp, but it appears that the tool isn't well-suited to wireless networks. With a consistently strong 48-54MBps connection to my 802.11g access point, which lies behind an indoor wall less than 25 feet away, NTttcp ended up crashing my access point, dropping the connection necessary to complete the test. WiFi-g worked flawlessly for file transfers and Internet use, though.

Update 6/13/2005 — We recently discovered that the ntttcp CPU utilization results included in this review were incorrect. The CPU utilization results have been removed, but they didn't factor prominently into our overall conclusion, so that remains unchanged. A full explanation can be found here.