In The Box

When you first crack open the plastic wrap that surrounds the retail box, you will be greeted by just what you would expect to see from this product. You get the external enclosure, mounting screws for the hard drive to be installed, all necessary cabling to get things running properly, a small manual, and a driver disk for those who may not have updated yet to WinME or higher.

Most of the items are pretty self-explanatory, so we won't go into too much detail over the accessories. That said, lets take a closer look at the enclosure itself.

The external unit is made of plastic and doesn't have a whole lot of bells and whistles. It does have some features that we'll discuss in a bit, but the exterior design is very minimalistic. This leaves you with a component that won't draw the eye and look out of place.

Turning the unit around shows us a little surprise; namely a 3-port USB hub! We've seen all sorts of added features on this type of device in the past, but the addition of something that actually has a useful value is a little unique. Also included in this area will be a power switch, a fan speed adjustment switch (for the active cooling fan seen inside), a power cable port and the USB port that is fed to the PC.

When you take the top off the enclosure unit, you see a neat layout that doesn't prove to be a hassle when it comes time to installing a drive. We have seen some issues in the past with layout designs, but they all look to have been addressed in a very satisfactory manner this time around. When it comes time to do the actual installation, you should have no difficulties at all.

Since we're already inside the enclosure, lets take a look at another of those little features I had mentioned a bit ago.

While it may not seem much, the concept shows a company that is thinking of the end user. If you take a close look at the ribbon cable used inside the device, you'll see that it has been folded in a manner that will allow it to be placed on top of the mounted drive and never be in the way. Sure, this is something that you could do yourself with relative ease, but its nice to see that a manufacturer is taking the time to think like an enthusiast.

Now that we've taken a tour of the enclosure, lets go ahead and install that old faithful Seagate 40GB IDE drive that we've used in the past and see how things go from there.