- Mar 11, 2000
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I bought the Cutie 2.5" Firewire enclosure for my 60 GB Toshiba laptop drive. I bought the enclosure from Primelite locally (Canada). Dunno if they do mail order though. Barefeats.com has previously reviewed it, here. Other Cutie enclosures have USB 2.0, but I don't use USB 2.0 (slower and you need drivers).
Pics!
It's a very simple (but effective) design. It has a hollow aluminum shell, and a circuit board inside on which the drive sits. The circuit board slides in along metal grooves in the aluminum shell. The front and back ends are plastic and are held on with tiny screws. Flip the circuit board over and you'll see it uses the Oxford 911 chipset. This thing is TINY, barely bigger than the 2.5" drive itself. In fact, the design only houses 9.5 mm drives. 12.5 mm drives will not fit. My version came with two 6-pin ports for daisychaining and a power supply port (not needed). You can get a USB 2.0 only version, or else a USB 2/Firewire combo. The latter has one USB 2 port, one 4-pin port, and one 6-pin port.
My Toshiba 60 GB MK6021GAS 9.5 mm 4200 rpm drive is powered up fine by Firewire power. I dunno if my drive would work off USB power in the USB 2 version, but I know that other low power drives do tested in other enclosures. (5400 rpm drives tend to be problematic however.) For those who might need it, the Firewire version still comes with an auxillary cord that can hijack additional power from any USB port if needed. It takes the place of an AC adapter. A nice touch is the fact that the cord has both a female and a male USB end, so you don't actually lose a port when using this cable.
The carrying case is very nice and has a pouch which holds the Cutie perfectly. It has room for one Firewire cable, and it also has a side pocket. Included in the box are Firewire enclosure, carrying case, 6-pin to 6-pin cable, 6-pin to 4-pin cable, USB power cable, instructions, screws, and a miniCD driver disc. (Drivers were not needed for OS X.2 or Windows XP.)
I got over 20 MB/s for sequential reads and writes in Xbench (Mac software) with the Toshiba drive. Not bad for a 127 x 76 x 15.5 mm (5 x 3 x 0.6 in) 4200 rpm laptop drive that sits in a wallet.
(I haven't tried HDTach or Sandra or whatever, since the drive is formatted HFS+, a Mac format. My XP box will read it using Macdrive, but of course it's not quite as fast as using native FAT32.)
One thing a few have worried about is the fact that it doesn't have protective bumpers like the Lacie PocketDrive. However, I don't think that's an issue. The Sarotech has the nice (padded) carrying case to protect it, and you can plug everything in with the drive still in the pouch. The drive power and activity LEDs are still visible too (at the bottom right corner of the picture).
If I were to buy another 2.5" enclosure, it'd definitely be the Cutie.
Pics!
It's a very simple (but effective) design. It has a hollow aluminum shell, and a circuit board inside on which the drive sits. The circuit board slides in along metal grooves in the aluminum shell. The front and back ends are plastic and are held on with tiny screws. Flip the circuit board over and you'll see it uses the Oxford 911 chipset. This thing is TINY, barely bigger than the 2.5" drive itself. In fact, the design only houses 9.5 mm drives. 12.5 mm drives will not fit. My version came with two 6-pin ports for daisychaining and a power supply port (not needed). You can get a USB 2.0 only version, or else a USB 2/Firewire combo. The latter has one USB 2 port, one 4-pin port, and one 6-pin port.
My Toshiba 60 GB MK6021GAS 9.5 mm 4200 rpm drive is powered up fine by Firewire power. I dunno if my drive would work off USB power in the USB 2 version, but I know that other low power drives do tested in other enclosures. (5400 rpm drives tend to be problematic however.) For those who might need it, the Firewire version still comes with an auxillary cord that can hijack additional power from any USB port if needed. It takes the place of an AC adapter. A nice touch is the fact that the cord has both a female and a male USB end, so you don't actually lose a port when using this cable.
The carrying case is very nice and has a pouch which holds the Cutie perfectly. It has room for one Firewire cable, and it also has a side pocket. Included in the box are Firewire enclosure, carrying case, 6-pin to 6-pin cable, 6-pin to 4-pin cable, USB power cable, instructions, screws, and a miniCD driver disc. (Drivers were not needed for OS X.2 or Windows XP.)
I got over 20 MB/s for sequential reads and writes in Xbench (Mac software) with the Toshiba drive. Not bad for a 127 x 76 x 15.5 mm (5 x 3 x 0.6 in) 4200 rpm laptop drive that sits in a wallet.
(I haven't tried HDTach or Sandra or whatever, since the drive is formatted HFS+, a Mac format. My XP box will read it using Macdrive, but of course it's not quite as fast as using native FAT32.)One thing a few have worried about is the fact that it doesn't have protective bumpers like the Lacie PocketDrive. However, I don't think that's an issue. The Sarotech has the nice (padded) carrying case to protect it, and you can plug everything in with the drive still in the pouch. The drive power and activity LEDs are still visible too (at the bottom right corner of the picture).
If I were to buy another 2.5" enclosure, it'd definitely be the Cutie.
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