X-bit labs

Nine External Enclosures for 2.5” Hard Disk Drives Roundup

Category: Storage

by Andrey Kuznetcov

[ 01/31/2006 | 02:18 PM ]

Today we are going to introduce to you nice external hard disk drive enclosures for 2.5” HDDs with USB 2.0 and some also with IEEE1394 interface. We will discuss the solutions from Sarotech, Tekram, ST-Lab, and Thermaltake as well as from the less well-known Agestar. Which enclosure will be the best choice for your needs? Find out from our roundup today!

Table of contents:

• Testing Participants
  
• Agestar External Enclosure 2.5” IUB2A6
  
• Agestar USB Portable Hard Disk Box IUB201
  
• Sarotech Cutie DX FHD-254UK Pocket Hard Disk Drive
  
• Sarotech Cutie DX FHD-254UF2 Pocket Hard Disk Drive
  
• STLab 2.5” Hard Drive Enclosure S-132
  
• Tekram USB 2.0 Mobile Rack Kit TR-621S
  
• Thermaltake Muse 2.5” Aluminum USB 2.0 Enclosure A2291
  
• Thermaltake Max 4 2.5” Aluminum USB 2.0 Enclosure A2294
  
• Thermaltake Silver River 2.5” High Quality Aluminum Enclosure A2175
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in WinBench 99
  
• Performance in FC-Test
  
• Conclusion
  

This review was conceived to help in choosing an external container for a 2.5” hard disk drive for those of you who find the typical capacities of flash-memory drives too small. Well, we should test some hard drives rather than just containers then, shouldn’t we? As a matter of fact, the HDD enclosures to be reviewed here each makes up a nice high-capacity external disk drive after you insert a 2.5” HDD into it. What’s important, the total cost of the resulting device is going to be lower than that of a same-capacity brand-name external HDD which would only differ from the “homemade” one in that the hard drive was inserted into the container on an assembly line.

Maybe the homemade external disk drive is less reliable and less fast than the factory-made one? Why then? Hard drives they use in brand-name external HDDs are the same as you can find in any PC shop, so there shouldn’t be any difference.

So, if there is a difference between a self-assembled and a factory-assembled external drive, it is only about the design and stuffing of the container. This is why in this review we will deal with nine external HDD enclosures from such renowned brands as Sarotech, Tekram, ST-Lab, and Thermaltake as well as from the less well-known Agestar.

One of the devices had already been tested in our labs (see our Agestar IUB201 review), but we retested it once again under the same conditions as the others for a correct comparison.