Well, first I must ask ... do you like the device, and the performance? If so, then the article may not apply to you.
There could be several reasons for the sub-par performance. Perhaps the ADS drivers were/are not well-written. There could have been something wrong with the hard drive or the internal cable used in the test. The tests themselves could be "biased" to a certain degree, since most of testing I've seen in this area either is with a drive connected directly to an IDE port, (or in the case of USB 2.0 drives) with an internal PCI USB 2.0 adapter card, which is usually bundled with the drive.
I would suggest that you pick up copies of the tests used by Mr. Schmid, and do your own testing in this area, before accepting someone else's word as gospel. Online reviews and articles are not always conducted as thoroughly as an end-user might do, with more time available. And your computer might achieve results that vary widely from what was shown in the article. You should also notice that the results are now out-of-date, and there have almost certainly been driver updates since then, both for the ADS USB housing, the mainboard chipset drivers, and any USB patches recently released by Microsoft.
Do your own testing, publish your conclusions, and see if you are satisfied with the device. That's really all that counts, in the long run. Personally, I think the Ziff-Davis WinBench 99 benchmarks are nearing the end of their useful lifespan, and HD Tach really only functions well if the drive is unformatted and unpartitioned ... and it is best for only determining burst rates, which could (and can) be limited by the chipset type, or even by an unnoticed IRQ conflict (which is not unusual in WinXP, as ghosted devices often cause conflicts difficult to detect by the user without altering the Registry.) HD Tach results may also not be entirely accurate, as there are complaints that the program shows drop-offs in drive performance with sequential write speeds (RAID 0) compared to SiSoftware's Sandra HD tests, which show increased speeds when running RAID 0. Which can be confusing for the person doing the testing, as you might imagine.
I really only use benchmarking programs to discover if a device is functioning within the advertised, "normal" expected parameters. Beyond that, everything else is nitpicking, as people can often spend a great deal of money in the name of the highest performance, simply for bragging rights.
Here's a link to the latest drivers for your kit, which may or may not be newer than what came on the CD-ROM:
<A HREF="http://www.adstech.com/support/downloads/drivers/drivers.asp?os=Windows&product_id=USBX-804" target="_new">Version 6.22.100.1441</A>
Toey
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