Computing on Demand PC News & Reviews
One of the problems I had with hooking up HDD’s in this unit was the cable. It is to be understood that this unit wasn’t made for constant changing of its internals, but for my use; that’s what I do. During testing the cable actually separated from its connector, this is a major problem to me. Although I was able to manufacture another cable to continue using the enclosure, most consumers would do nothing of the sort and be left with a rather large piece of plastic and aluminum. This can be easily avoided by simply providing a cable with a handle or thumb clips.
Luckily, it is pretty easy to dismantle and hook up another cable. Simply remove 2 screws and remove the cable. While you have this thing in pieces you can see that it is not very complicated. There is your IDE to USB converter, power, and cooling.
Testing is simple. Hook up a drive and see how well it performs. For testing I used a Maxtor 10 GB HDD Fireball 541DX (2B010H1) and my newly manufactured cable. It’s a 5400 rpm flavor rated at 100 MB/sec. Now, I know you are going to ask why I used such a small drive. The answer is simple – DROP TEST! Aside from that, this drive has proven to be reliable and performs well.
