Date: February 3rd, 2009
Article by: Jackie Mueller (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited By: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Icy Dock
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PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING
When it comes time to swap out a drive, a tug on the lever releases the drive so a different one can take its place. Most new motherboards support hot-swap functions, but make sure to check the board's manual first. If hot-swapping is supported you can take out drives while Windows is running without the risk of data loss or corruption.
For testing, I took a freshly formatted 250GB Western Digtial hard drive and hooked it up as a secondary drive inside the PC, without the enclosure. I then transferred a large file to and from the drive with these results:
4.35GB File Transfer (no enclosure)
|
Time (minutes:seconds) |
Write to drive |
1:30 |
Read from drive |
1:19 |
The drive was also benchmarked with HD Tune Pro before installing it in the enclosure. This program not only measures the performance of a drive, it can also check for errors and provides detailed information on specifications and features.
Now that we have pre-installation results, let's compare that to the results after the drive is inside the enclosure:
4.35GB File Transfer (inside enclosure)
|
Time (minutes:seconds) |
Write to drive |
1:31 |
Read from drive |
1:19 |
Results are just about identical all the way around, so you won't have to sacrifice any performance for the convenience of using the enclosure. Temperatures hovered around 33-34C for the most part too, which is well within an acceptable range. The cooling fan isn't loud at all either. Even after turning down other case fans as low as they would go, I had to get pretty close to the enclosure before I could hear the fan noise.
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