As with any storage device the ultimate point of interest is how it performs. Is data transfer slow as ever, or speedy like other internal drives?

To solve this question we tried two tests, one benchmark with Sandra, and one timed data move. The reason being Sandra reported values which were out of step with the HotDrive's actual performance. I'd guess that the benchmarking program had a bit of a difficulty going through the IEEE1394 adapter to get to the drive perhaps.

The Drive Index rating for the HotDrive while connected through the Advansys IEEE1394 card posted about twice as well as with the adapter card Evergreen ships. The value of 5700 lies way below the actual representation of this drive however.
Sandra benchmarks with the Evergreen IEEE1394 card posted lower values than with the Advansys Card, but both values were still substantially out of step with the actual performance of the HotDrive.

The timed trials illustrate how WELL the HotDrive really performs. The time to move about 2.0Gb of data from our test computer to the HotDrive using Evergreen's IEEE1394 Card was about 11 minutes, surpassing the 12 minutes it took to move this same amount of data between our two internal drives.

As you can see by the trials, the HotDrive showed the best performance when hooked up to the Advansys IEEE1394 card. Performance that definitely gives any internal harddrive a run for its money.