VisionTek Wallet Drive USB 3.0 Storage Enclosure Review

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As with most things in the world today, the ability to personalize your storage is a luxury most of us have. With that said, vendors continually release new enclosure designs further widening the range of product from which we can choose. While many of these storage enclosures offer great performance, not all are created equal, and it really depends on how far the vendor is willing to go in delivering a product to market.

The Wallet Drive from VisionTek is a rather unique spin on the traditional USB 3.0 storage enclosure. This solution is capable of holding a single 2.5" hard drive or SSD up to 9.5mm thick rather easily, along with supporting the latest SATA 6GB/s interface. In addition, the Wallet Drive features an attached USB 3.0 cable that enables the solution to bus power drives and quickly store away.

Compatibility of the VisionTek Wallet Drive includes Windows operating systems, along with Mac OS X. MSRP stands at $19.99 with a one-year warranty.

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Packaging for the Wallet Drive has an image of the enclosure on the front, with branding at the top and features listed at the bottom.

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Scope of delivery is very simple with this unit, as the enclosure itself has everything built in. Above, we have just reading materials and the enclosure itself.

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Looking over the enclosure, we found the design of the enclosure modest. Above, we have a simple plastic tray with the electronics, which is then covered by either a koskin or leatherette material. To the right, the small wrap around flap houses a magnet that attracts to the enclosure once close enough securing the drive inside.

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We installed our Intel 730 SSD in the enclosure. I was quite surprised to see, through the use of small plastic tabs on the sides of the plastics tray, this solution was able to hold our drive rather securely. The USB cable protrudes from the top of the unit, but is designed as a flat cable so that it lays against the enclosure when not in use.

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Testing the Wallet Drive, we first look at our results from Windows 8.1 and see that we were able to reach 392 MB/s read and 346 MB/s write.

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Moving over to our MacBook Pro, we began testing the Wallet Drive on OS X 10.10. Here we came up with 388 MB/s read and 311 MB/s write.

The Wallet Drive, like I said in the beginning, is a unique solution that will certainly cater to some user's needs. While the leather look isn't for me, it doesn't appear that VisionTek cut any corners in the design of the enclosure. The plastic tray that your drive sits in feels solid, but not brittle like plastics tend to be, and while the leather certainly isn't real, it does have a good feel to it similar to your standard faux leather office chair.

The performance of the enclosure was quite good in both Windows and OS X where we found both operating systems capable of producing upwards of 390 MB/s read and 310 to 340 MB/s write.

The one thing worth noting with the performance of the unit is that I did have some dropouts when testing. I would connect the device, start running a benchmark and would get an I/O error and the enclosure would reboot and come back. This could have been an anomaly for sure, but we haven't had that issue in quite some time, nor with any other devices tested in the same time frame.

Overall, despite our issues with the unit dropping out at times, I would say the enclosure is a decent product for the price point. There is certainly plenty of performance and style housed within this enclosure, and as long as you do indeed get a good unit, it's a steal at the given MSRP.

PRICING: You can find the VisionTek Wallet Drive for sale below. The prices listed are valid at the time of writing but can change at any time. Click the link to see the very latest pricing for the best deal.

United States: The VisionTek Wallet Drive retails for $24.23 at Amazon.

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