- Jul 5, 2000
- 5,988
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If you have a spare internal hard drive laying around but would like to use it for something, an external enclosure would be a good use. The one I ordered was a Rosewill from NewEgg.com for $27.99.
There are some cheaper ones available, but what swayed me to this one was the On/Off switch; located in the back; that comes with it, while the sub $20.00 ones did not, at least from what I saw.
Here is a picture of the whole box.
This picture shows the contents of the box. On the left has the power cord, USB connector, rubber stands, & screws. On the right is the instruction manual, drivers for USB 1.0/2.0, Firewire, & USB Floppy Device, and lastly the enclosure.
Here is the rear panel. The On/Off switch, power plug and USB connector all goes here.
After I pullled out the enclosure from the box, the rear panel easily fell out. Which is probably due to the poor plastic retention clips shown shown here on the rear panel. Trying to put it back on, it wouldn't hold and just slipped back out but in the end it won't matter and will show why farther down.
To mount the external HDD, you have to slide out this. Here you get a good view of the IDE ribbion cable. Here is a closer picture of the IDE cable and the 4 pin molex connector.l The wire that running down the side is the power LED.
Here is a view of the HDD in the mounting frame, note there are no screw holes on the side for the HDD. To mount your HDD securely, you'll need to flip the frame over and put the screws in like this. But don't use the extra screws you have laying around. There are screws that come with it, if I were to use these screws, I wouldn't be able to slide the frame back into the enclosure because they stand off too high. The ones provided are low profile screws.
One important thing to remember is to put the HDD jumper into Master or if you have a Western Digital they usually require the removal of the jumper from Master.
After the HDD is mounted to the frame and the cables attached, it becomes a snug fit for the HDD. I had to bend and squish the cables so the frame could slide back into the enclosure.
When you get the frame back in, you can put the rear panel back into its place and use two screws to hold it in place, one for each side. The packing also includes screw plugs for the two screws that were put in. I opted to not use them as I can see it would be a pain to remove them if I ever wanted to put a different HDD in place of my WD120JB.
Last part you have to do is put the rubber stands on them. They give you 4 horizontal rubber mounts and two vertical rubber mounts. (poor picture sorry
)
The horizontal rubber mounts have to slide in shown here on the top left. there are grooves for the rubber mounts to slide into the plastic grooves on the enclosure.
My only real complaint was the power plug. With this design on a power strip, it can take up more real estate than needed, they should have flipped the connectors 90 degrees and it would have fit perfectly into a power strip.
Windows installation was done on Windows XP SP2 and it was as simple as plugging in everything and Windows did the rest. It shows up under Disk drives in Device Manager, when you flip to the tab Policies you can choose between "Optimize for quick removal" or "Optimize for performace". I did benchmarks under both and didn't see anything different between the two. Just a convience factor, where you have to use "Safely Remove Hardware" for the Peroformace feature while using the the Quick Removal you don't.
Benchmarks using HD Tach 3.0
Quick Removal
Performace
Also, decided to run a real world transfer from my desktop to the external HDD, the file was 1.065 GB in size and took 1m 25s to transfer over.
There are some cheaper ones available, but what swayed me to this one was the On/Off switch; located in the back; that comes with it, while the sub $20.00 ones did not, at least from what I saw.
Here is a picture of the whole box.
This picture shows the contents of the box. On the left has the power cord, USB connector, rubber stands, & screws. On the right is the instruction manual, drivers for USB 1.0/2.0, Firewire, & USB Floppy Device, and lastly the enclosure.
Here is the rear panel. The On/Off switch, power plug and USB connector all goes here.
After I pullled out the enclosure from the box, the rear panel easily fell out. Which is probably due to the poor plastic retention clips shown shown here on the rear panel. Trying to put it back on, it wouldn't hold and just slipped back out but in the end it won't matter and will show why farther down.
To mount the external HDD, you have to slide out this. Here you get a good view of the IDE ribbion cable. Here is a closer picture of the IDE cable and the 4 pin molex connector.l The wire that running down the side is the power LED.
Here is a view of the HDD in the mounting frame, note there are no screw holes on the side for the HDD. To mount your HDD securely, you'll need to flip the frame over and put the screws in like this. But don't use the extra screws you have laying around. There are screws that come with it, if I were to use these screws, I wouldn't be able to slide the frame back into the enclosure because they stand off too high. The ones provided are low profile screws.
One important thing to remember is to put the HDD jumper into Master or if you have a Western Digital they usually require the removal of the jumper from Master.
After the HDD is mounted to the frame and the cables attached, it becomes a snug fit for the HDD. I had to bend and squish the cables so the frame could slide back into the enclosure.
When you get the frame back in, you can put the rear panel back into its place and use two screws to hold it in place, one for each side. The packing also includes screw plugs for the two screws that were put in. I opted to not use them as I can see it would be a pain to remove them if I ever wanted to put a different HDD in place of my WD120JB.
Last part you have to do is put the rubber stands on them. They give you 4 horizontal rubber mounts and two vertical rubber mounts. (poor picture sorry
)The horizontal rubber mounts have to slide in shown here on the top left. there are grooves for the rubber mounts to slide into the plastic grooves on the enclosure.
My only real complaint was the power plug. With this design on a power strip, it can take up more real estate than needed, they should have flipped the connectors 90 degrees and it would have fit perfectly into a power strip.
Windows installation was done on Windows XP SP2 and it was as simple as plugging in everything and Windows did the rest. It shows up under Disk drives in Device Manager, when you flip to the tab Policies you can choose between "Optimize for quick removal" or "Optimize for performace". I did benchmarks under both and didn't see anything different between the two. Just a convience factor, where you have to use "Safely Remove Hardware" for the Peroformace feature while using the the Quick Removal you don't.
Benchmarks using HD Tach 3.0
Quick Removal
Performace
Also, decided to run a real world transfer from my desktop to the external HDD, the file was 1.065 GB in size and took 1m 25s to transfer over.
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