ViPowER VP-9258V

The second hard disk drive enclosure I’m going to review today is made of a more traditional material – it is plastic of the grey color of aluminum. Removing the top panel you can see that the design is strengthened by means of metallic inserts intended for installation and fastening of the hard disk drive. The rear panel is metallic, too. On the inside, a PCB is attached to this panel. On the outer side of this panel there are a power switch, a power connector, and a connector for the so-called SmartCABLE which is the exclusive feature of the VP-9054V Smart Family of HDD containers. These products all use the same VP-9054 container, but are equipped with different “smart” cables. The supported interface varies accordingly. In our case we had a VP-9208 cable that supports the USB 2.0 interface. The cables are cleverly designed with two latches on the sides of the connector for better contact. You can take a look at the screenshot above to see possible shipment versions of this enclosure.

On the front panel of the container, there is an activity LED and a miniature fan. Unfortunately, despite the special cooling device, there are no vents in the other panels. This worsens airflows and heat removal. This enclosure can be positioned vertically, too. The dimensions of the device are 225x130x36mm. The accessories to the enclosure include a power adapter with a cable, a USB cable, a stand, mounting screws, a CD with drivers and utilities, an installation guide, and a user’s manual.

The average retail price of this device is $40.

Testbed and Methods

To check out the real performance of the two enclosures we need a hard disk drive. So I took a Hitachi HDS722525VLAT80 whose potential performance is higher than the bandwidth of the USB 2.0 interface. So, the enclosure that this drive will have a better performance in will be better than the other one. I used WinBench 99 2.0 and FC-Test 1.0 to investigate the speed characteristics of the resulting external hard disk drives. The testbed was configured like follows:

• Albatron PX865PE Pro mainboard
• Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU
• IBM DTLA-307015 HDD, 15GB capacity
• RADEON 7000 32MB graphics card
• 256MB DDR SDRAM
• Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4