Addonics Sapphire Write Protect Storage Enclosure Review

We take a look at the Sapphire Write Protect from Addonics, a unique external storage solution for protecting your data from being modified.

Published
Updated
Manufacturer: Addonics
2 minutes & 11 seconds read time
TweakTown's Rating: 87%
TweakTown award

The Bottom Line

Addonics' Sapphire Write Protect is one of the most unique solutions to come through the lab here at TweakTown. Utilizing hardware level write protection, you can be sure your data is unable to be modified within a simple and well built enclosure.
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When you want the utmost in data security, there are a plethora of solutions available on the market today utilizing varying levels and methods of hardware encryption. When you want to take things to an entirely new level eliminating every possibility of your data being modified, you deploy a solution like the Addonics Sapphire Write Protect we have in house today.

The Sapphire Write Protect carries the same aesthetics as previous Sapphire enclosures from Addonics. Adding to this, the Write Protect is capable of supporting SATA m.2, mSATA SSD and CFAST flash cards via the included 2.5" adapters. Compatibility of the Write Protect extends to modern operating system including Windows, Linux Kernel 2.4+ and OS X.

MSRP of the Addonics Sapphire Write Protect is set at $179.99 with a one-year warranty.

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The scope of delivery for the Write Protect includes all the adapters mentioned above, including mSATA, NGFF for SATA m.2 SSDs and CFAST flash cards. Additionally, we have the power adapter and USB 3.0 cable.

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Taking a closer look at the adapters, you can see the NGFF setup supports all the standard sizes from 2230 to 2280.

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The front of the Sapphire houses the drive bay, along with two sets of LEDs, one in the tray for activity and one on the enclosure for power.

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The rear of the unit houses the power button, power input and USB 3.0 connection.

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When we powered up the Write Protect using the NGFF adapter, we went over to disk manager in Windows and noticed our drive did in fact show up as read only. With that said, it's important to note that you must have partitioned and formatted your drive previous to using it in the Sapphire Write Protect.

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To test the read performance of the Sapphire Write Protect, we had to use HDTune as its one of the only benchmarks available that doesn't need to write a test file to check performance. As you can see, the Addonics peaked out at 274 MB/s sequential, while pushing around 5000 IOPS at 4K.

The Addonics Sapphire Write Protect is certainly a unique solution for those wanting a read only solution. To that point, Addonics even goes as far as to say this is the first on the market to support read only on flash media. Build quality is rather good as we have come to expect from Addonics, these units have repeatedly been built like tanks and the weight for such a small solution does add to that.

Performance of the Write Protect was quite good as well. Now we didn't break any speed barriers, but we did manage around 270 MB/s in sequential reads and around 5000 IOPS random read.

As far as usability is concerned, after setting up our SATA m.2 drive and then installing it into the Write Protect, I had no issues accessing the data. However, the Compact Flash adapter did give me fits while trying to use that with my SanDisk Extreme card.

Addonics Sapphire Write Protect Storage Enclosure Review 100
TweakTown award
Performance 85%
Quality including Design and Build 90%
General Features 90%
Bundle and Packaging 90%
Value for Money 80%
Overall 87%

The Bottom Line: Addonics' Sapphire Write Protect is one of the most unique solutions to come through the lab here at TweakTown. Utilizing hardware level write protection, you can be sure your data is unable to be modified within a simple and well built enclosure.

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Tyler joined the TweakTown team in 2013 and has since reviewed 100s of new techy items. Growing up in a small farm town, tech wasn't around, unless it was in a tractor. At an early age, Tyler's parents brought home their first PC. Tyler was hooked and learned what it meant to format a HDD, spending many nights reinstalling Windows 95. Tyler's love and enthusiast nature always kept his PC nearby. Eager to get deeper into tech, he started reviewing.

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