2.5” HDD Rack

Besides using the Momentus in a notebook, it’s quite possible to make it a portable storage device, just like any other small-size disk drive. When the popular flash-drives are too small to accommodate the data you need to transport to another computer, the Momentus with its light weight and compact size may come to the rescue. If this is the case, you may want to use it with a mobile external rack of the 2.5” form-factor working across the universal USB 2.0 interface. Such combination may turn to be less expensive than other solutions, while being quite easy to handle.

So, here’s the other product we willy-nilly have to include into the review. It is an external mobile rack from Apricorn. In terms of the manufacturer, we are going to deal with a “notebook hard drive upgrade kit”.

The kit includes the rack proper and two cables – power and interface. The power cable is connected to the PS/2 port and has a splitter at the end for you to use it along with the mouse/keyboard. The second cable is a standard USB 2.0 one.

The design of the device is quite simple: two lids and an internal board with the connector you plug the HDD into. An In-systems SD300A1 chip controls the work. The upper lid has a LED signaling the work mode of the drive. The back panel of the rack carries the interface and power connectors as well as a switch to choose the power source – PS/2 or USB.

Testbed and Methods

So, we tested the Momentus in two roles. First of all, it worked where it was supposed to – as a system HDD in a Toshiba Satellite A15-S127 notebook. Secondly, we tried to use the Momentus as a mobile storage device. This time it was benchmarked in the rack connected to the PC across the USB 2.0 interface.

We used two benchmarks: Ziff Davis Winbench 99 version 2.0 and FC-Test version 0.5.3. The first is a classic benchmark, no need to comment. The thorough description of the second program is here. Briefly, it created, read up and copied five sets of files differing in their number and total size. After each test, the drive was defragmented.

The Toshiba Satellite A15-S127 notebook was configured as follows:

• Intel Celeron mobile 2.0GHz CPU;
• 256MB DDR SDRAM;
• Intel 82852/82855 graphics controller;
• DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive;
• The tested drive was working in the ATA/100 mode.

The desktop PC included:

• Soltek SL-KT400A-L mainboard;
• AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU;
• 256MB DDR SDRAM;
• ATI RADEON 9500 128MB graphics card.

The both computers ran Windows XP with Service Pack 1 installed.