X-bit labs

Roundup: 9 External Enclosures for 3.5-Inch Hard Disk Drives

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 08/29/2006 | 09:22 AM ]

We hope this roundup of nine external HDD enclosures will help you save some money on an external hard disk drive. Instead of purchasing an expensive ready-made solution, you can take any internal HDD and put it into a special enclosure. The solutions we look at today accommodate 3.5" hard disk drives, support PATA and SATA HDD interfaces as well as different external interface – SATA, eSATA (external SATA), FireWire and USB 2.0.

Table of contents:

• Testing Participants
  
• AgeStar ICB5A
  
• AgeStar ICB5A1
  
• AgeStar CFB3A1
  
• STLab S-150
  
• Tsunami Speed 3500
  
• Tsunami Speed 3500S
  
• Vantec NexStar3 NST-360SU-BK
  
• Vantec NexStar3 NST-360U2-RD
  
• ViPowER VPA-35018
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in WinBench 99
  
• Performance in FC-Test
  
• Conclusion
  

We wrote this review to help you save some money on an external hard disk drive. Instead of purchasing an expensive ready-made solution, you can take any internal HDD and put it into a special enclosure like those that will be tested in this article.

We hope you will find an enclosure that suits you best among them.

So, we tested nine external enclosures for 3.5” hard disk drives. They support HDDs with PATA and SATA interfaces. Besides that, the enclosures differ in their external interface – SATA, eSATA (external SATA), FireWire and USB 2.0 – so there is a really wide choice for you.

The following table lists the enclosures about to be tested with the interface converter chip employed in each. This chip largely determines the performance of an enclosure:

As you can see, different manufacturers use different chips. This only makes our today’s test session the more exciting.

Testing Participants

AgeStar ICB5A

This enclosure is made of aluminum with black and orange plastic details. You can put 3.5” hard and optical drives with a Parallel ATA interface into it. The enclosure itself is equipped with FireWire and USB 2.0 interfaces. A fan and a power switch are located at the rear panel of the case. Besides the enclosure, the package contains a power adapter with power cables, a USB and a FireWire cable, screws, a device description, and a CD with drivers. The dimensions of the device are 173 x 60 x 255 millimeters.

Its average retail price is $36.